To clarify, I had finished my high school two years before and passed all my subjects in flying colors, but then, the 'naija factor' set in. To our collective horror, without any explanations, WAEC decided to withhold the chemistry result of my school so, all of us planning to read medicine, pharmacy and courses that required Chemistry for University admissions were suddenly left high and dry...for a whole year!
I spent a loooong year awaiting the release of my precious chemistry result (in which I had an A when it was released by the way!), only to have 'Aluta' (student riots) in Ife prevent us from resuming the following year again! Suffice it to say, when I was finally going to resume at last, in the Great school of my many dreams, of which my dad had regaled me tales from his days as a student there back in the seventies, I spent the sweltering 12hour drive from middle belt Nigeria to Ife in the southwest gleefully daydreaming!
I imagined the massive cafeterias where Daddy told me they were served choice dishes accompanied with a quarter of a whole chicken and tasty soups daily. The huge lecture theaters with the bright lights beaming down at night when you went to study. Oh! But above all, did I dream of the hostels! I imagined spacious, quiet rooms, where I could set up my 'corner' with my amateur interior decoration skills and where I would have a neat simple desk beside my bed to study late at night if I chose and carry out deeply intellectual discussions with my smart, geeky and bespectacled roommate. Or so I thought!!!
Mm, well, I won't gist you of the 'cafes' that had not functioned as food service stations in over twenty years, nor will I speak of the over crowded lecture theaters where we spent many a night 'jacking' (studying) via candlelight or rechargeable lamps. Oh, those I promise you, are 'delightful' stories for another day.
Naa, today is all about debunking those dreams of a cosy, warm and quiet hostel room. Let me introduce you to the Mozambique hall I was taken to straight from the registration point of the Faculty of Pharmacy. We drove past some majestic looking hostels (or halls as we called them), nice enough, albeit all needing a good coat of paint, they still looked like shadows of those great hostels my dad had described from the seventies and I was excited and exhausted enough to ignore the peeling paint on Sports Hall's walls, the broken glass of Awo Hall Cafe, the blocked drainage by Faj Hall, etc.
That was until we drove up to a cluster of blocks of bungalow buildings that to me looked EXACTLY like an abandoned village secondary school! The barbed wire fence was falling apart! The paint job on the walls could have been done before I was born for all I could tell and worst of all, the porter's station in front of the Hall's gate looked like Abule Egba Police station, I kid you not!
It did not yet penetrate my exhausted mind that this was to be my home for the next two years till I heard the agbero (bus conductor) in the dilapidated bus behind my parents car yell, 'Moz Hall, Moz Hall! Oya come down o! Last bus stop! Oya ebole!(Come down here!)'. I gasped in horror...!
(To be continued)
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