The Foo-el Station

On the 25th of March ( 9 Months till Christmas) we encountered the Jimmy Carter era re-visited. During Jimmy Carter's Presidency, those of us alive and driving at the time remember long lines at the gas stations to get gas for our cars. Who knows what caused it, but it was inconvenient and miserable.

One of our tasks is to learn to drive in a city of 29 or 30 million people. It is challenging to put it mildly. Our Mission President arranged for our mission driver who drives the Assistants to the President, the Elders on transfers and various other duties, to drive with us to the Chapels we are assigned to visit. Elder Krupp drove and Sister Krupp recorded and wrote directions. We have found no valid maps of this great city.
We drove to the Ogba (Ohg-baa) Chapel and back to our apartment twice, writing and recording both ways. We drove to the Yaba (Yah-bah) Ward building and back, once. This involved a total of 50 Kilometers and took 3 1\2 hours to drive!

Now, for the fun part. Lagos had been shut down for 4 days for Easter. Friday and Monday were National Holidays. That means no gas stations were open. No tankers were filling the stations. On Tuesday morning, when we foolishly ventured forth to learn our way around, we observed lines of a mile long in the right hand lanes leading up to gas stations and gates closed leading in to the pumps. They call fuel, foo-ell! Our driver assistant's name is Bright Dankyi. Bright had been watching as we drove and thought he had spotted a station where we could fill up.

When we got back to where it was, it looked like we could get in. This sounds easy.
It's really fascinating. You pull as far as you can to the edge of the street, but there is not room in the station. Each pump had 4-5 cars lined up to purchase fuel. This should have been simple. Wait your turn and purchase your fuel when you get to the front of the line. Nigerians don't understand "wait your turn". Everywhere you drive, their objective is to push one car in front of you (meaning to crowd ahead). This means on round abouts where each of the cars is literally inches from the other cars front back and sides. You have to drive aggressively, yet carefully and try not to get dinged. That is the way the fuel station episode played out. We were 4th in line and while we inched our way to the pump, 3 other cars tried to push in from the left. This mean putting the nose of their car within one or two inches of our car. When you have "position", as we did, you just push forward without allowing them to get their hood or bumper in front or yours. If they get one inch in front of you, coming in at an angle, you've lost "position" to them and they get the next fill. It was our turn to approach the pump. A Nigerian man and woman moved to stand in front of our car to allow their friend to move in front of my bumper and thus, up to the pump. Bright jumped out of the back of our car and yelled at them to move away from the front of our car, as I moved forward to the pump. It was really ferocious for a few minutes. They were bound and determined to keep these White Folk from the pump. Bright is a good sized Nigerian and was having nothing to do with it. We got our foo-ell, sold in Liters for N70 (70 Naira) per Liter. The conversion is 3.2 liters to the gallon. At N70 per liter, that computes to N224 per gallon, or $2.04 per gallon. Pretty cheap! Nigeria is the largest oil-producing country in Africa.