Here’s a short piece I wrote for the Times about a less-exciting-than-expected election tribunal.

Here’s Lydia’s preemptive story about Tuesday’s election tribunal. I contributed a bit of reporting from Lagos.

Here are some links from my old site to previous writings:

Kenyan Pins Election Hopes on a Big U.S. Name - New York Times

Why We Don’t Hear About the Conflict in the Ogaden - Slate.com

Interview with MediaBistro

Congo By Rail - New York Times

Surge in Adoption Raises Concern in Ethiopia - New York Times

Solar Flashlights Deliver Light - New York Times

I am awake when she shuffles down the hallway, past my door, towards the kitchen. The flop of her sandals echoes on the tiles. I can picture her hunched form, shrouded in black, lighting the kerosene stove and boiling milk. She is young, has to be young – the landlord’s third wife, the two small children – so why does she move like a woman beaten down by time and old age? I can’t tell from her face. She wears a burqa.

A Nigerian housewife like thousands of others. Except her husband never comes home. He could. His office is only a five minute drive away. But he doesn’t. So she sweeps floors, nurses Abu, now seven months old, washes clothes, and sits in a plastic chair watching the foot traffic pass by our street.

Her two year-old, a pudgy girl with hair in mini twists, has taken to walking through my living room every day after pre-school. She comes to my chair and rubs her hands over my arm to say hello, then rushes off to one corner or another before heading back outside for more interesting pursuits like ice cream. The white guy living in her house, as much of a novelty as he is, still can’t compete with ice cream.

She treats the girl rough, showing little affection, and in the afternoons I have to choose between leaving my doors open and hearing her frequent crying or shutting them and enduring the now breeze-less room.

When you buy food at the street stalls you are supposed to bring your own bucket or pot, or else they ladle runny soups and rice dishes into plastic bags and hand them to you for your walk home. I didn’t have a bucket or pot, so I got the plastic bag treatment. When she saw me eating out of it one night she gasped, then clucked to herself and went to the kitchen. She came back out with a shiny red pot and put it on my table.

Her voice is loud, and rattles like a snare drum.

A few times she has knocked on my door to borrow my cell phone, and I always hesitate when handing it to her, unsure how to make the exchange without physical contact, unsure where to look. She has no such concerns and grabs the phone impatiently.

I want to talk to her, ask her about her life before marriage, what she thinks of her husband and his other wives. But we live in the same house, and there are lines.

I will live below this woman for a year. Play with her children, lend her my phone, borrow her pots. For a year. And never see her face.