"You are highly welcome"

The computer says 1021 am and my cell phone says 720 pm and my head feels it's simply not any decent hour. I've slept little in the past few days and I'm ready - so ready - to quickly sleep without thoughts of dinner except that I have to wait for a phone call to confirm tomorrow's travel.

There is a mosque very near by and the call to prayer just sounded. I have yet to be able to explain why I find this song so comforting and beautiful. I remember a time when it would wake me at 430 or 5 am but now I sleep through it easily and am actually happy if I do manage to wake up to it at all.

The same driver met me at the Abuja airport after slight hasseling by customs over the large box containing the XRF. Smiles and patience seem to be the best strategy with authorities. But O greeted me by name, took one of the four bags I was hauling (a small backpack on front, a large one on back, a large rolling suitcase in one hand and an XRF in another). I expected the heat to shove me back when I left the air conditioned terminal, but the heat is fairly mild, relative to the rest of the year. A slightly humid eighty degrees sort of hugged us as I politely declined dozens of offers for people to carry luggage, transport me in a taxi, and sell phone recharge cards.

O and I talked about the increasingly frequent and devastating terrorist attacks in Nigeria, the most recent one on Christmas day in a church not far outside Abuja. In a strange contrast, he sees Boko Haram as targeting only Christians and the attacks as being purely about religion. Yet the next breath, he spoke of how well the former president, a northerner (O is form the south) handled the group when he was in power, how Goodluck (a southerner) is failing to achieve the same success at battling extremism. Then he briefly but intensely talked about the last war and the things he saw, at one point scratching under his eye in a way that made me think he might cry. Once you see that, he said, you never want war again, there is no point to it. Nigeria is approaching a precipice from which the fall is not clean and the distance not known.

All of this is such an odd contrast to Zamfara, which is most certainly effected by the events yet somehow seems so very far away from it all. I remember a conversation with one of the remediation managers on our first trip here more than a year and a half ago. On the topic of religion, he said 'Christianity and Islam are so similar - it's the same God, just different ways to worship.' He went on to say that of course Christian women shouldn't dress and act as Muslim women - they're not Muslim. And as the call to prayer continues, loudly, I'm very much looking forward to our return Zamfara tomorrow. Harmattan should be subsiding, but everyone down here warns me of the cold in the north. It's all relative, as usual, and compared to the snowshoeing trek I took on xmas day (only 2 days ago?!), I think it will be survivable.

I have no idea how productive this trip will be and I'm afraid that the conference in January will be the only tangible outcome. I suppose the root of my fear is that this will really only be a three week trip and that it will be the last one we make.