An Experience

The true and sincere nature of man is shown by the events that takes place in his life. It is true that man's real existence is nothing. Man himself is nothing! All he has is nothing. Even everything around him and indeed things surrounding him are nothing but a charade!

As I sit here in an empty school, awaiting the arrival of learners that may never come, for me to teach, I realise that I am just wastin away by the minute, rather by the second!

I left home far away in the south western part of the country, pregnant with life changing, course charting ideas that I thought to pass to the coming generation through the opportunity of the NYSC Scheme of the federal government. I was hoping an expecting real challenges that will bring out the that hidden man in me and at the same time take out the kid in the learners I hope to encounter during my stay in the hinterlands of the Eastern heartland. But these were not to be!

In the eastern heartland, I was orientated, drilled, trained, instructed in the traditional NYSC way to surmount the challenges which they say I will face in the service year. Till now, I haven't seen any, except if sleeping, eating and walking will be called challenges!

While at the orientation camp, backed by my pregnant desire to impart useful knowledge, I prayed and wished to be taken to the state capital where I know that more than enough challenges will await me and as a Lagos boy, such was already in my blood! It wasn't to happen!

Lo and behold! I was thrown into a community more than an hour an one thousand naira away from the capital city of the eastern heartland! This is a community with power supply that is as erratic as an epileptic woman. The power supply comes once every two weeks and lasts a few hours, sorry minutes! To add to it, the community, albeit, the whole local government has no potable water. To get water for anything at all, bathing and drinking inclusive, you wait for the rains or you hold your money and container and walk for miles before getting to one of the private and solitary boreholes run by individuals.

These I don't see as challenges because I expect not much from a village! The baby I am carrying in me is more than that! Impart the right values into the younger generations, it cried in me.

The P. P. A accepted me and I began to prepare for the new term and also nursing hopes that my baby has seen a good environment to be nursed. Thus, I await the birth of a new term which, then I thought, will in turn help in the birth of my ripe foetus.

I went back to the south west which housed my home to prepare things that will aid the easy delivery of this good baby in this new found environment. After that, I came back to my new 'home' to settle down and await the new term.

The Village received me well and helped me settle quickly into its too quiet and nature filled environment. I began counting hours, days, weeks, and a month! Waiting patiently for my P. P. A to open.

Finally, schools re opened and I excitedly ran from my home to the school to start the process and familiarisation of myself to my audience in whose hands my baby will grow. I got the shocker of my life, when I met rats instead of students in what should have been my school!

I panicked, went back home. I called my principal who assured me that it's just for that day. They willl show up he said. But they haven't and might even not! Why? Because they have changed their schools! The Governor of the eastern heartland declared a free education policy and so the mass exodus of students in private schools to the public schools! But this notably happened only in rural areas as private schools in the urban areas of the state still flourish. My P. P. A being private and being in a rural village, also got a part of the bullet!

Come to think of it, how much is their school fee? A paltry two thousand five hundred naira across board is what these villagers can't pay! The truth is even that the children mostly spend more than that in the preparation and actual school changing! They sewed new uniforms and bought new sandals! So I still carry my dream and I am wasting away brain draining in this village when there are hundreds of places where my baby is needed in my native south western home!

On a lighter and brighter side, my monthly NYSC is clearance is still being signed for me by the principal while I do nothing except sleep, eat and walk around! Also since religion is, as said by Karl Marx, the opium of the people, I take it as a divine act to be here and learn that really, man cannot, all the time architect his own fortune or otherwise!

As I hear the principal's car approach, I pray to my God, Who knows all things, for a miracle to happen and that students will come and I will be able to deliver what I have for them!