Norma’s Letter from Jos, 24 March 2011

Subject: Vegetable orders for Thursday 31 March

Date: Thursday, March 24
From: Norma

Hello customers,

It has been a rather unsettled week in Jos. Political rallies in the town resulted in some incidents of fighting between party supporters, shooting by security forces, and a generally insecure environment. Security personnel found large caches of various explosive materials, and there are rumours that many political leaders have been distributing guns to their supporters. Residents of Jos are afraid of more trouble, and life has more or less come to a standstill again. On the farm it was generally quiet, but an attack in a nearby village resulted in the killing of a relative of one of our workers, so our work schedule on the farm was somewhat disrupted as the workers attended the burial.

We do not know how things will be in April during the elections. We are planning to continue with our weekly (Thursday) delivery schedule, but we will have to see how the situation develops. We did not know that the whole country would virtually shut down because of the elections. Many of our customers seem to have gone on holiday, and relatively few of you are still in Abuja. Our problem is that our delivery van has still not been repaired, and we are depending on a hired vehicle for deliveries. This costs us N25,000 each time we come to Abuja. So if the orders are very few, we will hardly be able to recover the cost of delivery.

In any case, we will have (hopefully) a normal delivery next week Thursday, and after that we will see what to do week by week at least until after Easter. Our main problem is that our farm is full of vegetables, particularly lettuce, spinach, etc. that need to be picked and eaten. ..