I thought since you and many other Nigerians live in the Houston area, you might be interested in the following article from Wall Street Journal. Enjoy it and give it a try. So far, my referrals are yielding dividends.
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Wall Street Journal
September 7, 2001

There Are Lots of Jobs Available
If You Want to Be a Roughneck
By ANN ZIMMERMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

FAIRFIELD, Texas -- When a football scholarship fell through, Bronson "Bull" Holmes dropped out of college. The tuition was just too much of a burden on his single mother, who runs a convenience store.

Standing on the grimy, hot deck of Rig 203 as it corkscrews through 20,000 feet of mud and rock, the 26-year-old derrick hand says he always meant to go back to school to study criminal justice. But with drilling busier than it has been in years, things are just too sweet for him to leave this town 1 1/2 hours north of Houston.

So sweet, in fact, that three months ago he paid off the mortgage on his mother's mobile home. In the past two years, he has had three big raises. He now pulls down nearly $50,000 a year as the drilling company he works for fights a serious labor shortage in the oil patch.

"We ain't hurtin' now," says Mr. Holmes.

San Francisco and San Jose may have been the places to be two years ago. But in the midst of the broadly deteriorating U.S. economy, employment boom towns have been springing up in places such as Rock Springs and Gillette, Wyo., across east Texas and the Rocky Mountains. Rigs have sprouted all over as more natural-gas wells are being drilled than at any time in nearly 20 years. This summer, the number of active rigs hit 1,293, more than double the number operating in early 1999 -- darker days for the industry.

Applicants here don't need fancy degrees or venture capital to be roughnecks, the term for lower-level oil-field workers. Rather, muscle, the ability to survive sweltering heat and a willingness to bunk with co-workers can pay off. Drilling companies and contractors are in such desperate need of hands that they are paying $75,000 a year or more to roughnecks working seven days on and seven days off.

Two years ago, there were hardly any such job openings and they paid as little as $20,000. But natural-gas prices went from a low of $2.25 per thousand cubic feet in late 1999 to $3 in the spring of 2000, soaring to a high of $10 in late 2000. Though the price has fallen back recently to less than $3, new gas-fired power plants are due to come online in the next few years, and demand for gas is likely to rise.

High prices have meant fabulous profits for energy companies and the businesses that serve them. Nabors Industries Inc., the Houston driller that employs Mr. Holmes, saw its profit more than quadruple, to $187 million in the first six months of this year over the like period in 2000.

Some of those newfound oil riches are helping to rejuvenate once-sleepy towns such as Fairfield and surrounding Freestone County. Between the energy boom and a new power plant going in, the streets of Fairfield, a town of 3,500, are clogged with traffic. Restaurants are packed; rental housing is impossible to find. The Holiday Inn Express, one of four motels, has been booked solid on weekdays for about a year, according to hotel manager Jay Patel.

Business has been so brisk at the Bossier Country Chevrolet and Chrysler dealership that it recently completed a $2 million remodeling and expansion, aided by a 15% increase in gross sales. And thanks to natural-gas drilling, the value of taxable property swelled by $500 million, or 42%. The tax rate has been reduced and, even so, tax revenue is up $5.3 million, or 30%, this year.

County employees were given a 10% raise, county Judge Linda Grant says, and plans are afoot to fix streets, double the appropriation for renovating the Freestone County Museum and give $15,000 to a railroad museum.

The renewed activity in the oil patch has been a boon to Gilbert Daniel, owner of five restaurants in town. He estimates sales are up 20% this year.

Yet to the people around Fairfield, this boom seems different from the last one, tamer and somewhat less ostentatious. Sheriff Ralph Billings chalks it up to folks learning their lesson in the early '80s. "After going through two busts, it seems more people aren't living so wild and free this time," he says. "Now there is a realization, from top to bottom, that good times can end just as quickly as they came."

The workers doing the heavy lifting say they are trying to be careful with their money this time -- not running off to Louisiana casinos so much.

The roughnecks put in 12-hour days, at wage rates ranging from $13 an hour to $19.25. For more than half their time, they are paid time-and-a-half. They also collect a $20-per-day food allowance. Most of the men live too far away to commute, so after their shifts, they kick back in rent-free, air-conditioned mobile homes, with full kitchens and a washer and dryer, sharing a room with six other guys in bunk beds.

The industry lost one generation of hands in the mid-1980s slump and another in the slump in late 1998, says James Nash, a burly, snuff-dipping Nabors superintendent sporting mirrored sunglasses and a gold-nugget ring.

When work started picking up last year and the number of rigs in and around Fairfield grew, Nabors put up Mr. Nash, his wife, Brenda, and their two toy white poodles in a doublewide trailer a few miles off the highway. They check on their house in Nacogdoches, about 100 miles away, every few weeks.

On the wide front porch of the mobile home, which doubles as a field office, a pile of job applications sits on a table under a paperweight that says "24-7." Most days, he gets pretty far into the stack. Mr. Nash has hired about 400 workers in the past year to work here in the Bossier Sand Pla oil and natural-gas field.

"It's a gravy train now," says Nathan Simmons, Rig 203's tool pusher, the equivalent of a ship captain. Mr. Simmons, now earning about $75,000 a year, just bought himself a brand-new Ford 350 diesel dual-exhaust truck, in silver, and a travel trailer. His wife, a nursing director for a home health agency, just got a new Buick.

The work can be hard and potentially dangerous, and it takes him away from his wife and three children, who live 3 1/2 hours away on a farm in Louisiana. But he says, "I never dreamed I'd be making this much working six months a year."

Such a dream is what prompted Royce Bayless to hitchhike five days from Joplin, Mo., in search of a job. He had just left his marriage of 15 years -- "It wasn't working out," he says -- arriving with the clothes he was wearing and a knapsack with some extra shirts and a razor.

Mr. Bayless, 36, was a derrick hand for Nabors in Wyoming in the mid-1990s before the work dried up and he ended up peddling fruit in Missouri. Once his previous experience was confirmed and he passed a drug test and physical, Mr. Bayless was given a job as a floor hand screwing together 34-foot-long drill pipe on Rig 255.

There, he started working for tool pusher David Roop, 37, who recently bought a 22-foot Cajun fishing boat and purchased 6 1/2 acres of land in the bucolic Texas Hill Country -- the same part of the state where dot-comers and "Dell-ionaires" from Austin snapped up acreage. There, Mr. Roop and his wife plan to build their dream house.

Mr. Bayless has dreams of his own. "I'm ready for a new start, a new stake in life," he says. "And I knew I'd find it in the oil fields."