Day 13
Wednesday, 10th March, 2010
I was woken up at 2.30 AM in the morning by the strong noise of thunder shower on the tin roof of the Hotel. The rainy season is about to start here and the rains look similar to Monsoon in India. On the way to Office, we saw the first casualty of heavy downpour from last night. A tree had fallen off and the authorities had blocked the complete road on one side (even during peak commuting time) to clear the debris. All the vehicles had to go across the road divider to go on the other side. Our ride to Office Mr. Celestine Ogar had spent considerable time in New York and had a long experience of driving there. He was certainly not impressed with the way things were handled...
We are trying to come up with a framework and design approach to compile a database of different business in Cross River State and also publish them as a Business Directory on the Internet. Thus we invited representatives from couple of professional bodies and associations including NASSI (Small Scale Industries), MAN (Manufactures Association), Mines Association and Chamber of Commerce. The meeting was also attended by Mr. Gerald Ada, Special Advisor (SA) for Investment Promotion Bureau. It was a good discussion with them and all the members got an opportunity to voice their concern over different issues to SA. However, looks like there is a huge gap in communication and are a lot of trust issues between these bodies and Bureau.
We went to a restaurant in the evening to have a taste of authentic Nigerian cuisine. As usual managed to order something vegetarian for me. The food was Ok. Greg, Jamie and Patricia wanted to stick with basics and had order pizza. However, their pizza never came and they had to settle with Club Sandwich. After we had almost finished with our food all of a sudden the electricity went off. And to all our surprise, no one in the restaurant bothered to make some arrangement with any alternate light. We were sitting in complete blackout for more than 15 minutes. Fortunately, the mobile phones provided by CDS has flashlight. The generator was switched when we were about to leave. Certainly, it was not the best example of Customer Service. However, no one here seemed to bother.
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