Visiting Nigeria: Part 3 -First Workshop Day

Part 1 | 2 | 3

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A: University College hospital,Ibadan, B: Entrance to College of Medicine

Monday morning, the first day of the workshop, and the adrenaline was already pumping. Today, we would have the opportunity to check out the facilities we had to work with, as well as meet our students for the first time. All of this, would be held within the College of Medicine, a teaching outcrop of the University of Ibadan, nestled within the grounds of the University College Hospital.

The hospital itself was an overwhelming structure, apparently one of the largest (though not the largest) on the African continent. It was where the "best doctors" in the country were trained, professionals to be admired for their passion. The place was not the usual immaculate vision of sparkling white walls, sterile presentations that we Westerners were accustom to - it was certainly a lot more "used," a prominence of grey, whether from age or grime, seemed ubiquitous And yet, it was clear that the level of care was exemplary, at least given the resources available.

As mentioned before, our workshop setting was to be found within the College of Medicine, specifically in the Institute for Advanced Medical Research and Training (IMRAT for short). We, of course, began with an opening ceremony - this one distinct from others Michelle and I have experienced in the past, because it actually took less than two hours instead of the usual parade that often took on epic proportions. Speeches made here included those by the Vice Chancellor, as well as the Director-General of Nigeria's National Biotechnology Development Agency, the government agency that appeared to be the primary government force acting to push science infrastructure forward.

It was also at the opening ceremonies, that we got to meet some of our students for the first time. About 15 or so, had made it to the opening ceremony, many came from within the boundaries of the city of Ibadan, but others had come from the further reaches of the country (one student, a professor actually, had traveled all the way from Maiduguri, some 1000km away). From our first chance of meeting, it appeared that we were working with many research associates, some senior graduate students, medical trainees, lecturers, and a couple of professors. Most appeared to be young, possibly in their mid twenties, with about 25% of the class being female.

After the opening ceremonies, we got to "scope." And momentarily, we were buoyed by what we saw - overall, the conditions seemed a lot better than what we had before. Soon, however, a number of nuances came to light that threatened to make things problematic.

First off, it sounded like we had a total of 37 registrants, that many were still "traveling." This was a larger student set than anticipated. As well, instead of the usual "one large room" to hold the lab, we were told that our laboratory space was in the context of 6 separate smaller room allocations. Two of which were reasonably sized (say about 200 square ft), two of which were small, and two of which were actually elsewhere in another building on the campus.

5 of the 6 rooms available to us. The bottom right image is the computer room

This, of course, would prove to be problematic. Especially considering that there were only three of us (myself, Michelle Brazas, and David Peterson), to somehow monitor the activity. Thankfully, we had access to one lecture room, and one computer room that could accommodate all of our students.

As well, although equipment status was such that we appeared to have access to things like a microcentrifuge and a PCR machine (something necessary for many of our experiments), it was fairly apparent that, overall, there were many things that we didn't appear to have, or appeared to have very little of. For instance - we had access to only a small number of pipettemans (specifically, three p1000s, three p200s, and two p20s). This, arguably, was significantly better than when I was in Lagos 5 years ago, but in western terms, this number of pipettemans would be considered appropriate for almost (but not quite) three work stations. Obviously 37 students divided into 3 groups is hardly optimal, and this didn't even take into consideration, the fact that we could only fit such a large group into maybe two of the rooms offered.

Access to tips and things like tubes was also problematic (no tubes as far as we could tell), but thankfully one of our luggage bags that did make it through the airport, had a reasonable number of such things. Internet also appeared to be a major issue. We could gain access to internet, but only at predetermined times, because use of such a service came at a substantial price. We were fortunate enough, however on that day, to be allowed to email our families at a Faculty member's office, and it was here that it became apparent that internet was also going to be slow - very slow indeed.

In any event, our immediate plan of action was to focus on the remaining part of the day by providing about 2 hours of introductory lecture that afternoon. This would give us ample time afterwards to prepare solutions, sort out equipment needs, or equipment substitutions, so that the laboratory exercises could begin in earnest the following day. Ultimately, this meant that the workshop that was supposed to start on July 22nd, was to really begin on July 23rd. Another example of "African Time."

Anyway, the lecture went well overall, and it was nice to interact a bit more with the students. I made a lot of reference to MacGyvering techniques, because I strongly felt that intimate knowledge of the biochemistry of the techniques could translate to good science even in the most challenged of situations. As well, it was already clear that we would be doing a lot of this MacGyver stuff first hand anyway in the upcoming two weeks. During that discussion, when I explained the concept of MacGyver to the audience, many mentioned that in their circles they would have called it "improvisation." Nigerian scientists, apparently, were good at improvisation.

And so, we started to prepare reagents for the first lab. Here, we decided to pre-aliquot everything out, with also an emphasis on being able to do the experiment with as little use of the pippetteman as possible. Thankfully, most of this first lab could be done in such a fashion, so we were buoyed that things should run pretty smoothly for that first lab exercise. Also, I had planned that we always would have the option to do experiments with the student's own tissue - specifically from a cheek cell rinse. This proved fortuitous, since getting samples of any kind (be it vegetable, bacteria, tissue culture or otherwise) seemed a near impossibility. It wasn't clear why this was - it didn't seem to be because such samples weren't available, but rather something more to do with attitude. For some reason, it seemed wholly inappropriate to ask for such things from the scientific community around us (but more on this attitude later).

In any event, if we were to do a cheek cell prep, we would need a rinse solution - preferably a saline solution. The problem was that this solution would have to be something that was clean enough for students to put in their mouths. After all, we had no intention of being remembered as the foreigners who accidently poisoned their unsuspecting students. Unfortunately, the NaCl stock provided didn't look so good (it had congealed into a solid entity from the humidity). And from previous experience, we knew that the salt we could get from a cafeteria would likely need to be filtered from insect parts.

Overall, this wasn't looking too promising, until we heard that there was an autoclave somewhere close by. Whether we would have access to it, however, was another matter. As well, if African time was any indication, there was also the worry that even if we did have access to it, we would not be able to use it until too late. It appeared that autoclaving that evening was not an option, so we decided to prepare the solution in the hopes that the opportunity would arise in the following morning.

It was also at this point, that we also decided to use only the 4 rooms that happened to be in the IMRAT building. We were hopeful that the 15 or so students we saw, would not swell to the original 37 estimate, which meant that it was potentially doable with the 4 rooms in close proximity.

With that, we felt like we were ready for the next day. And so, there was an optimistic feel to the air as we made our journey back to our accomodations. I even volunteered for the middle seat again.