Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Bienvenue mon amour!
Hi, my name is Chinwendu and you are definitely new here, so welcome! I am so glad you found my pieces worthy of reading. I am, by nature a storyteller and I love to share these stories of mine with people, in the hopes that you learn a thing or two from them, asides the comic relief of course. This is a blog that will evolve over time, for now it might just be for sharing stories, but later on I might choose to evolve. I hope you’ll stick with me regardless.
Entry 4: The boarding house
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.
Entry 3: Fasting from my device
On Wednesday, I went to work without my phone, deliberately. It was a social experiment I wanted to try on myself, just to find out if anything would happen to me if I don’t use my phone for a whole day. My addiction to this device was becoming sickening.
The first thing I noticed when I was about to leave the house that morning (without my phone ofc) was that I felt naked. I felt as though I had failed to put on a final piece of clothing and a part of my body was being revealed, it felt weird to be honest😂
Second to that, my tote bag felt super light 😂😂 it was so funny because I knew what my brain was trying to do to me but I refused to bulge.
I walked out of the house feeling rather excited, I tried to pay close attention to my surroundings so I could write about it in extensive details but alas! I got distracted by an endless loop of thoughts.
I would be lying if I said the air in my lungs felt fresher and better, I mean, I had hoped that this would be the case, but it wasn’t really. But one thing stood out to me, I was happy, really happy to be doing this.
Because I am writing this entry many days later, I honestly cannot recall much from Wednesday. I wish I had listened to the Holy Spirit when he asked me to do this on Wednesday evening.
When I got to the office I was a bit restless, I didn’t really know what to do with myself without my phone, so I slept a lot (when I had no patients of course). I came prepared anyway, I had a book with me, so I spent some time reading the book, when I wasn’t sleeping.
Initially I felt as though I were experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Everything just did not feel right without my phone and I was always checking the time, hoping for it to be 5pm already. However, with time, both my body and my mind settled into my current reality and I began to make peace with it.
But some things stood out to me though. I was kinder to my patients, more emphatic, more patient, and more gentle. I wasn’t in a hurry to get procedures done, because there wasn’t anything to go back to after performing these procedures.
Nothing radical anyway, there was no radical shift in my life or day’s experience, but I’m guessing that’s just because it was my first time. I intend to do this more often as the weeks go by and see how it changes my life, for good, because I know it will.
My true intent for this experiment is for it to become a kind of weekly fast, where I plug out from the digital world and all the noise that comes with it, and plug into God’s rhythm and the peace and solitude it brings to my soul. I won’t say I achieved that on Wednesday, but then again, it was just an experiment to see if I could truly stay away from my phone and it worked, I did it.
Maybe, when next I do this I’ll have something more interesting to write about.
Entry 2: Lucky?
…
Today Chinenye called me lucky, or blessed, I can’t remember the term she used exactly. For context, Chinenye used to be my school mother in secondary school. It warms my heart everytime I remember how we first started talking.
Back then in school, during Christmas we used to do this thing called “secret santing” it goes without saying that we used to have secret Santas and it used to be such an interesting period.
There would be random “aaahs” and “omg’s” as students would open up their lockers to see gifts they weren’t expecting. And then the suspicious looks and glares, wondering who the “secret Santa” was.
It was mostly done voluntarily, so that year I had decided that I wanted to be a Secret Santa to Senior Chinenye, as she was popularly called then. I chose her because… to be fair I can’t even remember why I chose her of all people, we weren’t even friends, she was four years ahead of me.
Oh, I remember now, it was the way she used to talk, I found it interesting and I just took a liking to her because of that, amongst other things. One thing led to another, from being her secret Santa, I found myself asking her to be my school mother and she said yes, lol.
Since then, I think this was in 2013, we’ve somehow always kept in touch and now I can even say we’re friends, although our friendship dynamic is still like a mother-daughter one which is great honestly, it feels so good to be taken care of.
She’s one of the few people who genuinely make me feel loved and appreciated, or maybe it’s just the way she is. And she knows me so well, especially when I’m about to start tearing up, like today when she was about to leave.
When we were in secondary school, going to visit my school mother was such a big deal. I’d make sure to have my bathe that evening, put on my prettiest night gown, comb my hair, and even spray perfume 😂 just to visit my her. She in turn would either buy many random things for me from the tuck shop, or sneak in food from the dining hall, so I could enjoy my visit. Interesting stuff.
Anyway she came into Abuja some days ago and I immediately reached out when I found out she was in my city. Of course one of us had to visit the other 😂 We agreed that she would come see me at the office today due to both our tight schedules.
She came to see me at the office today and after giving me a hug, she next thing she said was “You’re lucky o, you’re working in a very nice place”. I’m paraphrasing because I can’t recall her exact words, I was just happy to see her.
After a little bit of chit chat, she gave me the package she got for me and hugged me one last time before leaving. This was when I started thinking to myself “lucky?”
I’d worked in my office for so long that it didn’t even seem like anything to be grateful for. But then again an image flashed through my mind, I remembered when I used to pray to God, with tears in my eyes sometimes to get accepted in the hospitals I’d been applying to for my internship.
For months on end, I’d send applications, sometimes even go to certain hospitals in person, hoping for a positive feedback, but none came. I’d pray to God, whine and complain to my family and friends about how God was taking too much time to answer my prayers. And now that I’ve been granted my petition? I don’t even realize it for the blessing that it is.
Entry 1: The man in the cab
The man who sat beside me in the cab this evening was rather interesting. I made a note to carefully take in details of his appearance so I could describe it the best way I could.
He wore a pair of jeans, a black tee shirt and a jean jacket to top it up. He was also carrying a brownish leather school bag, not leather exactly, but I don’t know how else to describe it. To be honest I can’t recall what his face looked like because he was looking out the window the entire ride. He looked scruffy though, like he had just spent his whole day beating metals or molding bricks.
When he got into the cab, I noticed that he was on a call, I peeped into his phone screen and saw that the contact on the other end of the call was saved as “My ❤️” immediately I put one and two together and figured he was probably speaking to his girlfriend, or fiancée, who knows ?
I thought he was going to end the call when he got into the cab, so as not to spare us the details of his intimate conversations with his lover, well, at least that’s what I’d do. But he carried on with his conversation and it was so refreshing to listen to.
Interestingly, he had a good command of English, so I was all the more intrigued. He spoke to her like she was the only person who mattered, he didn’t care that the rest of us in the cab could hear him.
From what I heard him say, his phone had been bad for a while and it strained their communication a bit. He complained about how she wasn’t putting in as much effort into communicating with him during the time when his phone got spoilt.
Anyway, for what it was worth he got a new phone today, and even though he tried to hide it in that manly fashion of men never showing their excitement, I could tell he was really excited about it.
When he asked her for a video call, she declined saying her phone’s screen was spoilt. I was a bit suspicious and immediately protective of this young stranger sitting beside me in the cab. I felt his lover was lying to him and it made me a bit sad for him, but he didn’t seem disturbed.
He sounded happy talking about the simplest and most mundane things about life. Like how he couldn’t afford the phone he actually wanted and eventually opted for this one but he doesn’t mind, because after all they’re all devices.
I thought to myself if I could say the same thing if I were in his position. I wondered if I’ll feel content using an android device.
He also told her that the period when he didn’t have a phone helped him realize the people who were really his friends. I chuckled internally because I found it funny, but I could understand what he was talking about.
I’m sure if I spend more time thinking about it I’d remember more of what he said, but I’m already so tired and sleepy.
Sitting beside that young man today really taught me a lesson on enjoying the little things of life, being grateful, and being content. It taught me that everything doesn’t have to be extraordinary.
With Love From Wendy 