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Living in a Developing Country Prepared Me for the Coronavirus Crisis
As I’ve mentioned several times, I spent most of the ’80s and early 90s living in Nigeria, the country of my birth. Nigeria is classified as a developing country so it struggles with some of the basic necessities of life in the developed world such as regular running water, power and access to medicine. During the ’80s, I vividly remember coming home from school and having to get in the family car and go fill up cans of water so we could have dinner and bathe.
Even if you live a middle-class lifestyle in Nigeria, as I did, you still have to deal with these issues. So this means, while you might have had a VCR and TV, you might not be able to watch them half of the time, because there was no power. (Wealthy Nigerians get around this problem by having their own power generators, which automatically kick in during the frequent blackouts.)
Needless to say, making the transition from London to Nigeria was a huge culture shock. Apart from dealing with the aforementioned issues, I also had to cope with a school system that still practiced corporal…
