About five miles from our house, this waterway connects several local towns and is also a passage to nearby neighbor Nigeria. The women washing their clothes next to the boats and the kids unloading boxes of frozen fish (visible in boats in photo) asked me not to take their picture. They told me that they used the boats to take goods back and forth to Nigeria, about an hour away using the stalk of a palm frond to push off the shallow bottom for propulsion. Sunrise was extra hazy on this day because of the Harmattan, a dry, dusty wind that blows from the Sahara at this time of year.
no photos of the kids because they fear the camera will steal their souls (a common fear in Asia as well) – or because those kilo stacks of frozen “fish” are packed with a special brand of ice…?