Making My Hair- Round 4

If you have been following my blog from my days in Romania, you may recall that my Nigerian friends braided my hair three times while there, once every winter. If you haven’t been following my blog for that long, you can find entries about two of those times here and here. So obviously now that I'm actually living in Nigeria, I needed to have my hair braided (or “made” as they say here; e.g., “I made my hair”). I did so this past Saturday, accompanied by my host family sister. While the actual time for braiding was significantly shorter than my past experiences (4 hours vs 8) due to the fact that the gal who did it does this every day AND she was particularly fast, the day still ended up being a marathon. A classic Nigerian marathon, really. We set an appointment with the salon for 9am. However, we got there at 945 because we realized that “environmental day” was happening in town (which basically means it’s a morning for cleaning up town and no one can drive until 10am) so the lady would likely not be there at 9. Even so, the lady didn’t arrive until 1030am. And the lady with the hair extension I needed to braid my hair didn’t arrive until 1130am. Hair braiding took place from 1130-330. And then I waited for them to finish my sister’s hair until 730pm. Long. Day. But a good end product to show for it, if I do say so myself. Here are some pictures of the process and the final result...

Love the sign for the salon:

  

Bisola and I "before":

During the braiding process:

Almost done, just need to coil the ends:

Finished and home resting: 

Lessons learned for future hair making- schedule an appropriate appointment time; buy the extensions in advance; go solo (though it was certainly necessary and helpful to have my sister the first time, it just ended up making both of us have way longer days than we needed). Live and learn!