Aisha Yusuf was the first person who spoke to me that night, with so much confidence and charisma she walked up to my bunk bed, sat on it and offered me a sachet of her cowbell strawberry flavored milk. Thankfully it was dark and there was no light, so she couldn’t see me scrunch up my face as I stretched out my arm to receive them.
Like every other Nigerian child, my mom had warned me never to collect food items from strangers, especially not in a boarding school several kilometers away from home. But most especially not from a girl who wasn’t even from the same religion or ethnicity as I was at the time. Oh little me, was I so foolish.
My first day at the boarding house was pretty uneventful. I mean excluding the parts where I cried so much that my mom couldn’t help but cry with me as well. Prior to that time I had been away from home a couple of times, but not with total strangers.
That Sunday morning at home, my brother had teased me so much about how I was going to suffer in the boarding house and no one would come to my aid. Although I’d put up a tough front and pretended to ignore him, deep down I believed some of the words he said.
So when Senior Mfon Nso asked me to take off my wrist watch right at the gate, all the tears I’d been holding up inside flowed like a river. So Tobe was right? I thought to myself, so all the seniors here are wicked and they’ll stop at nothing to make my life a living hell? It didn’t help that all the staff and senior students at the gate kept on shouting commands instead of speaking gently. I really felt like I’d entered a dungeon.
When I finally made it past the gate and waved my parents goodbye for the umpteenth time, I really had no tears left to cry. I just carried my belongings one after the other and followed the trail of the person leading me to my dormitory.
I saw a lot of other students there, sitting at the passage of the dormitory waiting for the door to be opened and immediately I wished I was assigned to another hostel, maybe red house, or even yellow house. They all seemed to have gotten along so quickly and being the shy person that I was, I didn’t quite know how to fit in.
So when Aisha Yusuf walked up to my bunk bed that night, although I couldn’t see her face nor form, I was so glad to have someone talking to me in this unfamiliar place. For the life of me I would have never summoned up the courage to walk up to anyone.
With Love From Wendy 