Christopher Vito: Arrival In Bioko (Pt 1)

cre: Christopher Vito: Arrival In Bioko (Pt 1)

I have been in Malabo, on the island of Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea for almost a week now. I have to do two a week, but our internet has not been reliable enough. Our router is a tiny little box that magically connects to the satellite internet – sometimes. It was out the first few days, but hey, it’s Africa and if you’re expecting anything better than that, you’re kidding yourself.
So anyway, I guess I’ll start from the beginning. After a 20 hour journey, I arrived with a group of 9 other students at Malabo airport and crammed a ton of luggage into a van – we each had 2 check-in bags of about 50 pounds and two hand luggage. (Note: the photo I attached was taken while landing in Abuja, Nigeria, the last stop before Malabo, where it was too dark to take good photos of the arrival) From the moment we got off the plane, it was pretty very clear that this is an entirely different world. The baggage claim area was swarming with people offering to carry our bags on carts for us in return for a fee which we were told would be a huge amount if we had agreed. And while security was checking my bags, our resident manager, David (an below average guy in his mid-twenties who we have now collectively referred to as Dad) had to angrily push away a man who insisted that I be him. ask help. He did it entirely in Spanish, and I guess I didn’t mention – Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish speaking country in Africa, and I don’t speak a word of Spanish. So all the communication was pretty difficult, but I’m getting there.
We could see part of the place on the way from the airport to our house, but since it was dark we didn’t see anything very good. When we got home and moved our things to our bedrooms, my two roommates and I learned that we would not have a light in our bedroom and that some of the outlets have way too much current or voltage. But David assured us that would be taken care of in a day or two. However, that day or two has gone on for the whole week and still has not been fixed as everything here is running on island time which basically means people get to things when they get there and very rarely so quickly. However, our room has an en-suite bathroom, which is practical. It’s a luxury here to have running water, so you can’t complain about the cold showers. And to be honest, when you’re in the tropics, a cold shower isn’t that bad. It’s in the 80s or 90s everyday with at least 90% humidity.

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