Issue Three: Serving Nigeria with my Heart and Might
In case you don't know I'm a serving corper, I've been serving Nigeria for ten months now and I have just two months left. So this issue is mostly an excerpt of my orientation camp experience. I camped in Wannune, Benue state. And I had a great time.
With Monday came the real camp experience, that Monday was my life for the next three weeks. I woke up around 4 to have my bath, went for devotion by 5 and we stood outside until 7:30 doing meditation, drill rehearsals, man o war exercises and platoon administration. 7:30 was the actual time for bath and breakfast but it helped if you had had your bath before then because time moved really fast in camp.
Then by 9 am, it was time to go into the hall to start listening to lectures, the infamous SAED lectures we had all heard of but were not looking forward to. It’s funny though that saed lectures were not the only lectures to listen to and of all of them, saed was actually the most interesting but we were stuck in the hall from 9 till 2 listening to different speakers talk about various things. I always found a way to fall asleep during these lectures so I can’t tell you what they said, even if I tried.
Then 2-4 was lunch and siesta, 4 was drill rehearsal till 6:30 which was dinner. By 8:30. There was a mandatory social night which was usually so boring that I slept through and then lights out.
Even though we had a strict routine that we always had to follow and there was barely any time to think in camp. I made a few friends in camp. At first, the only people I knew were people that had come in the same bus with me and even though these were the people I stayed with during camp, I also met so many other people. I had great conversations, I made new friends and I had fun during camp.
Benue is known as the food basket of the nation and I ate. I was not the best candidate for going to the kitchen but I had fun eating at Mami market, the market that has everything you want at camp. I ate so much that even though I lost weight and cheeks reduced, my stomach definitely increased and right now, I'm trying to nurse my pot belly into a flat stomach.
And maybe it is the fact that I was only used to Lagos and Ibadan air, the air was so much fresher and pure and the sky was the prettiest view. Every single day, the sky showed up and the clouds were pretty and the sky was blue and it was so lovely.
So now that my service year is coming to an end, faster than I expected. I now find myself thinking about camp because that was the most eventful part of my service year.
Since then, I've only relocated back to Ibadan and I'm now a ghost corper. And I find it easier to remember the nice parts of the past, than think about my uncertain future.
Are you currently serving? How's it going? Are you done with service? What did you do immediately after?
I'm currently not reading any book. I eventually finished good omens, you can check out what I thought about it here.
I'm currently watching a movie on Netflix called Mother of the Bride. It's a 1 hour 30 minutes movie, but I've spent days watching it.
The song I've been listening to a lot is By Now by Ckay. It's been playing in my head nonstop now because of how many times I listened to it this week.