Behold white woman with unusual passion in Northern Nigeria

A white school teacher from New Zealand, Fiona Lovatt Davis, has found a new home in Kano where she is trying to rescue street urchins popularly called Almajiri from their penurious lives on the streets by setting them up in business, writes SEUN AKIOYE who had an interesting encounter with her.

The telephone rang. “Hello, Assalam Alleikum,” the voice at the other end said. It belonged to a woman, probably in her early 50s. It was a big voice, the kind that usually belongs to women who carry authority or those who operate in the upper realm of the society. But there was something odd about the greeting: it came with the accent of one that was still trying to learn that Islamic way of greeting.

Fiona Lovatt Davis stood in a far corner at the domestic wing of the Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos, a large brown bag stood beside her and in the chaotic environment that usually occasions early morning flights at the airport, she cut a solitary figure.

A big white woman, her head was covered with a multi-colour scarf in the strict Islamic fashion, revealing only an oblong face speckled with black spots.

“Assalam Alleikum,” she greeted again, politely declining to take the reporter’s outstretched hand. There are many names that fit into the description of Ms Davis, a woman who through her career has always found herself on the other side of societal norms and expectations. From her robust online profile, one gets the feeling of a rebel with a worthy cause or, as she put it, “a peace operative.”

She had always had a penchant for doing things differently. Many years ago in her native New Zealand, she was asked to beat a student before she could earn her teacher’s certificate. She refused and instead took the erring boy outside and spoke “sense” to him. Broken, the boy volunteered to beat himself and Ms Davies got her certificate.

But she was determined that things could be done better, and after eight years of teaching in a government school, she left to start her own school, using her own unique combination of methods to teach the children.

She once visited a school and discovered that there were no books in its library. She got home and made her children give up the books they didn’t need again. They filled several cartons, which she gave to the children in need. Soon, the initiative gained national prominence and the Books Without Borders scheme was born. She thus became a national figure in her country, revered for her unusual approach to child education and selfless service to the poor.

That was the woman that came to Nigeria in 2001 to attend the 2nd Pan African Reading Conference hosted by the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN). Then her life took a different dimension. “I could not forget the scenes I saw when I came here in 2001, the smiling children and the warm people which was contrary to everything you heard in the news,” she said.

It was like love at first sight. In December of that year, she mobilised school children in New Zealand to donate books. The drive took on a national fervour, and using her friends at the RAN who “dealt with the bureaucracy,” a shipload of books was sent to Nigeria.

She said: “I just got this idea of sending books to Nigeria on information, literature, picture books. I had some friends in the Reading Association of Nigeria who dealt with the bureaucracy and got the books in without much expense. And people from New Zealand just joined me.”

Her book donation was not a flash in the pan as over 190 libraries across Nigeria has benefitted from her large heart.

Since then, Ms Davis has found a home in Nigeria or, rather, she found a home in Kano. Due to visa restrictions, she could not stay in Nigeria as much as she would have loved to. Hence she makes return trips every now and then. She came “home” on June 6 from New Zealand. After several hours of flight from Australia to Lagos, she had about three hours to wait before catching her flight to Kano.

For most people, this would not be a time to sit down for a two-hour chat with a reporter. But Ms Davis did.

It was an opportunity to understand her thinking, to read her mind and understand her philosophy. Her life is ruled by kindness and the necessity of being one’s brother’s keeper; the joy of doing little things that keep the world going.

She said: “Do the little things really count? If I throw a can into the drainage and it blocks the gutters when it rains, who do I blame? I can choose to recycle them or if I can’t handle my waste, I stop buying things in plastic bottles.”

Her idea of keeping climate change at bay, maintaining the sanctity of mother nature and stopping the violence against the earth is simple yet compelling, and she led by example. Dipping her hand into her handbag, she fumbled around in it for some seconds and brought out plastic cups.

“They gave me these in the plane to drink water and there is no sense in dumping them since I can reuse them later,” she said. With that, she cleaned one of them using the edge of a serviette obviously taken from the plane- and served herself a full cup of water.

Coming to Kano

Ms Davis had been struck by the life of the children in the North. It was an imagery that confronted and bullied her. She saw the privileges she had by the virtue of her birth and the sharp contrast to the experiences of others. She does not believe that the problem of the North is religion. Rather, it is the result of people’s failure to find a common ground, irrespective of their religious and cultural differences.

She said: “I don’t agree that the problems in the North are religious. I understand that people believe they are religious, but people don’t even talk to each other. They don’t find a common ground about faith and culture, and that is where the problems arise from.”

In her weird philosophy, she believes that those who have nothing materially but have freedom and are not constrained by societal norms and expectations are the rich ones. Armed with this mindset, she landed in Kano in 2011 and had a present waiting for her: the Boko Haram bombs.

“I came to Kano at the end of 2011 when the bombs started going off. A lot of foreigners were moving out of the city but I stayed. I came from the other side of the world. How can I run away? I still have three months to go and I don’t want to spend those in a hotel in Abuja. That is not why I came,” she said, an incredulous look playing out of the corner of her eyes.

If Ms Davis had imagined that her visit to Kano would be brief, she was wrong. The city was much different from anywhere she had been and she didn’t think she could last. “I was from such a green island living so close to the water. How could I have been 1,000 kilometres away from the coast? People living in Kano are the same population as the whole of my country. Different physical environment and there were a lot of motorbikes. The sky here is white, not blue. I didn’t think I would be able to last,” she said, laughing.

Her decision to live in Kano has left a permanent change in her life. In 2012, she converted to Islam and began to train the Almajiri who she often refer to as “my boys.” Living in Kano during the curfew had tremendous strain on Nigerians and even more on Ms Davis. In the evenings, she took a stroll round her neighborhood, and that was when she saw the Almajiri.

Tackling the Almajiri scourge

“Almajiri are not beggars and not all beggars are Almajiri. We need to use the proper words when referring to these guys because they are part of the society. I am not rehabilitating them because they have not left the society. What has happened is that they are only living outside of a house,” she said.

At first, the Almajiri came to her on the streets imploring her to teach them English language.

“The kids on the street are saying to me, ‘Mama, teach us English.’ So, I said ‘come on over’ and we just sat in the candle light and learnt and set up a little library in the house. And when there were too many people using our house then, I decided to run it in a Glo booth down the road so everyone could use it. We got the whole street reading,” she said with a smile that connotes a deep sense of satisfaction.

But that was just the beginning. Soon after, the homeless kids began to sleep out on her pouch, partly because it offered them safety and partly because it shielded them from arrest. “I became particularly involved with the Almajiri because these guys were sleeping by my door when the curfew started and I couldn’t send them off. I couldn’t abandon boys the age of my own son, like 14 years. So, they had to come into the house.”

Soon, about 12 homeless youths had found refuge under her roof. They became her boys and she their “big white mama”. The kids run errands around the house while Davis taught them how to read and write. She also tried to instill some discipline into them so they would not “derail” whenever she had cause to leave them.

It was a new life for the former street boys; a world far away from the one they knew or dreamt of. They exchanged the pavement for a room, the stone for a pillow. Their room had mosquito nets and proper beds and a fan. The children began a timetable for their education and Davis inculcated science, English and Mathematics into the Almajiri curricula. The result was phenomenal, with the children becoming vast in knowledge.

Ms Davis believes the Almajiri education is not worthless and that in some instances, it is even better than the conventional education. She should know because she has her boys as proof.

But their education also extended to business. In order to properly transform their lives, she began to set them up in business. “And some of them come with business proposals. They are not just going around saying give me a job. What they say is ‘if I have a bucket and some nuggets, I can go clean the shoes and it will cost N3,000 to do. If I get that I will be in business,’ ” she said.

Ms Davis found an answer in the form of giving the kids a soft loan to establish themselves in the business of their choice. “If I find a poor person on the street and I can make a loan that sets them up in business, it is business strictly. But I am not doing what others are doing, like taking 90 per cent of the profit or charging high interest. My goal is to make it convenient for these kids to pay back their loan. Sometimes they buy me out and become loan givers too,” she said.

Ms Davis figures that the more of the Almajiri she is able to empower, the more the number of kids on the streets would reduce. Having realised her own limitations in terms of putting the kids under her roof, she was determined to empower them financially, change their mindset and make them to want a better life for themselves.

Davis’s idea of real wealth

Speaking with Davis, one gets the impression that her adventure was a result of the crisis associated with middle age. She traded the comfort of her pleasant life in New Zealand for Kano where “to get a piece of cloth to make a kite, you are a wealthy kid. Even the bonus of a rain you can do moulding and you are a rich man.” That is Ms Davis’s idea of wealth as she sees on the dusty streets of Kano half-clad children running around the streets and women hawking on the road and barely making enough to compensate for their labour. That for her is the real wealth.

She said: “I see that there is nothing you want done that you won’t get someone to do for N50. We have this huge pool of labour who would work for N50. They will really work for a little amount of money. We call them poor and treat them badly. But the poor feed us. The farmer waits all year to bring in his tomatoes and we still haggle over the price because we think he’s a scruffy poor guy who is not ripe for civilisation..,” she said.

She has also tried to live out her creed. “I have had some invitations to come to some countries for one conference or the other but I just think about it that I could send another container of books for the price of a ticket. But now I come and stay for months not some two weeks of ribbon cutting and galas. Now I can come and do the work.

“The concern was what was this white woman coming into this country to do? I said what if I had been in Oklahoma when the tornado struck? What if I had been in Christ Church during the earthquake? What if I had been in Fukushima when the tornado happened? Stop imagining that Nigeria is the worst place in the world to live in.”

But her country men were not the only ones apprehensive about a white woman coming into Kano. Even Nigerian immigration officers in Australia were not straightaway convinced about her journey and denied her visa. It took the intervention of high profile Nigerians to convince the officials about her safety.

As part of her visa rules, she was not allowed to talk about religion. And after much prodding about her conversion to Islam, she said: “I wouldn’t say convert, I would say embrace. Islam just says you are committed to peace. It was in 2005 when I realised I am a Muslim. I didn’t know I could ever use the name of Islam. But I am not allowed to talk about religion. It is a condition for my visa,” she said in a bushed tone and glanced over the five immigration officers sitting at the next table also awaiting their flight.

Her family has not raised any objections to her new religion. “My parents are the finest Christians and here I am a convert to Islam. Does that mean our lives should be divided?” she asked.

Davis believes Nigeria should export more to the world than oil. She has an idea of exporting kulikuli in replacement for peanut butter, adding: “Many children would buy that. And the leatherwork, jollof rice, egusi, how come they are not making the mark all over the world?”

Her current project is to promote Mothers Alive, a programme she designed to reduce the high rate of maternal mortality during childbirth. Called Life Wrap, it is an anti-shock garment which helps prevent blood loss during childbirth. It costs two dollars and she is determined to raise enough to distribute the garments to women in the North.

“We see a lot of kids on the street and people ask what the mother was looking at. But maybe the kid doesn’t even have a mother because this nation cannot find $2 to save her life at childbirth. This is not something I can ask the president or governor to do. I have two dollars I can do it. If you don’t have the cash, and your blood is free of HIV, go down to the blood bank and give blood.

“We must stop the practice of buying and selling blood in this country. It is repugnant and there is nowhere that practice is condoned as Christians or Muslims. If it was your mother or sister, you would give her. So, give the blood now. Do we really think women should die because we won’t donate blood?”

Ms Davis was in one of her rare angry moods. It was evident the thought of human selfishness was eating her up. She expressed her hope of finding enough money to distribute free life wraps and then grabbed her bag. It was heavy, but she dragged it all the way to the elevator.

“These are stuffs for my boys. They really need it. And even though it is heavy, it is worth it,” she said and disappeared through the elevator.

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