So I had to rush to Lagos over the weekend. I must say it was one trip I wasn’t looking forward to.
I wore long sleeves, jeans and had two bottles of Sanitizer in my handbag. I think I must have annoyed people because I sanitised my hands every second, and nearly finished a bottle before I left Ghana.
I made sure people wouldn’t come near me, and didn’t care if they thought I was rude (chale the fear was real).
Anyways, as I checked in and went through immigration, I noticed all the workers had gloves on, with sanitizers at vantage points. I just thought to myself, “at least they are careful.” I don’t know why, but I felt a sense of pride in how serious they seemed to be taking this.
So I got into Lagos, even more paranoid and was probably the first to get off the flight. I had filled my immigration card in-flight, so I just went straight to immigration. Without meaning to, I started making mental notes of the differences between the two countries and their safety precautions.
First thing I noticed was the workers didn’t have gloves on in Lagos. I saw one or two people, but generally everyone seemed to be going on with business as usual. After waiting for my luggage for over an hour, I noticed a queue to the exit.
Well, it turns out that we were all to fill out forms to see if we had symptoms of Ebola or not.( Same thing we did in Ghana) although I wondered how honest people would be. Were they just taking people’s words for it?
But then they appeared with little laser devices they point at our palms, apparently, this could detect if we had Ebola. Two points [for] Nigeria. I was impressed. In fact, I suddenly felt my paranoia going down. But then I wondered why they waited for us to be on ground stand around at luggage claim; I mean basically leave us to interact for nearly an hour before deciding to test us.
I was like, “wouldn’t it be too late considering how many people were there and how easily it would be to get the virus from an infected person.” The annoying person that I am proceeded to ask the man conducting the test, “why not do it immediately people get off the flight?” He simply said, “Oh Madam, that was the plan oh! But you know how these things are: we didn’t get time to.”
I was left feeling like both Ghana and Nigeria were doing [it] “for show .”
Both countries were doing a lot to “show” their seriousness, but that’s as far as it was.
Anyways…that’s just part 1…..*sigh
