Imo

Igbo cooking leans on strong, bitter greens and on yam.

• Ofe onugbu — bitterleaf soup, the signature dish.
• Ofe oha — oha leaf soup, thickened with cocoyam.
• Ofe akwu — palm fruit soup, usually with fish.
• Abacha — shredded cassava salad with palm oil, ugba and fish. Eaten cold, sold everywhere.
• Nkwobi — cow foot in spiced palm oil, an evening dish.
• Ji — yam, boiled, roasted or pounded, and treated with real respect.
• Akpu (fufu) and garri as swallow.

Kola nut is offered to guests and is ceremonial, not a snack. Accept it with your right hand and let your host break it.

Imo is overwhelmingly Christian. The Catholic Church has a particularly strong institutional presence across the South-East, alongside Anglican and a great many Pentecostal congregations.

Sunday morning is genuinely quiet: shops open late and traffic is light until the afternoon. Camp runs a church with service times on the timetable, and a mosque for Muslim corps members.

Traditional titles and age grades still carry weight in communities. If you are introduced to a titled elder, greeting them by title rather than by name is the correct thing to do.

Igbo is spoken throughout Imo, with noticeable dialect differences between towns. English and Pidgin are universal.

• Kedu — how are you / hello
• Ị bọọla chi? — good morning
• Daalụ — thank you
• Ego ole? — how much is it?
• Biko — please
• Ka ọ dị — goodbye
• Ọ dị mma — it is fine / all right

Igbo is tonal and uses dot-below vowels (ị, ọ, ụ). Getting a greeting slightly wrong is fine; attempting it is the part that counts.

Keke napep dominate town transport in the South-East and run fixed routes for a fixed drop. Shared taxis and minibuses connect towns, leaving from motor parks when full rather than on a timetable.

The zone has some of the busiest interstate road corridors in the country. Travel with a registered operator, start early, and follow any movement guidance camp officials give — it is issued for a reason and it overrides anything written here.