The 119th good thing about Lagos: I don't have to wait in the lines for petrol

The other day I was going out to a meeting at the Chevron compound, which is a ways out of the island onto the Lekki peninsula via a busy road. The traffic on this road is often very bad. When I was going along it the traffic congestion was compounded by the problem of lanes being occupied by cars waiting in extremely long queues to get what we in the States call "gas." Here in Lagos, drivers often don't at first understand when we ask about the need to get gas -- gas is the propane or butane that you use for cooking. The car uses petrol or "fool," as they often refer to it. There is an extreme shortage of fool presently because Lagos recently got a shipment of contaminated fool, which damaged a lot of vehicles before tanks were purged. Our driver said today that they say the shortage will be alleviated hopefully by next week. But for now every petrol station has queues of vehicles waiting to fool up. Some of them looked like you could pass the day waiting in line for fool. My driver was able to fill the car's tank in the 2 1/2 hours that I was at my Bible study group this morning. I'm very grateful that I don't have to hassle with it myself! And the other day the drive home from the meeting was eased by the fact that most of the fool stations along the road had used up their supplies of fool and the lines of cars waiting had disappeared.