Tales from The Road to Akwa-Ibom

This happened some months ago.

1. 

It's dark and the asphalt rolled under the tyres as the bus raced on. We were heading to Ondo, and before me lay a couple of hours more to get to my destination – home. It's been four days since I last touched the walls of my room and those days were probably the worst days of my life yet. It's the NYSC; the obligatory one-year service to my country.

Before it became dark now, before a tiny fly found its way into my left eye the moment I removed my glasses, I lost the sense of what being in a day meant. Everything kept happening in a nonstop motion and I forgot to label the day as either afternoon or morning. But because it is night, and darkness awakens every sense that has become lost in you, and because you do not want danger to meet you on a Nigerian road without seeing it, I became aware of the chill of the air, the stench of the smoke emitting inside the bus, and moments and events that happened in the previous days came back unfurling. I started remembering, most in pieces, and some in whole. Those in pieces would eventually come to me as a whole. I hate that I carry some stories with me. Not all stories are meant to be shouldered.

2.

I witnessed this building grab additions to itself. I first met it open, unclad, and as unwrapped layers of bricks. It's a storey building and it used to look abandoned as goats fed on the grasses that grew around it. Later, it was covered at the top with dark roofings. Later, they started attaching doors. And later, windows. One day, as I strolled down the street, I saw plenty of logs of bamboo arranged around the body of the building. I would later find people climbing the pillars of the bamboo, stretching buckets filled with cement up to the house builders. Now, the house was fully covered in cream colors. House building is like the process of growth; bodies attach to bodies to form a body.

It was when I got to this building that I realized how fast I was running. I had called the bike man and he said he was already waiting at the agreed place. I would have asked him to come pick me up at my place but life is dangerous, as we all know. But he wasn't at the place yet. So I called again. He said he lied because he didn't know I was going to be that fast. He didn't know my body was not with me; my body was at the park where I was to board the bus to Akwa-Ibom. I had prayed, before leaving my house, against people who didn't know about the journey to know my whereabouts. The bike man later came and we rode on. To the park.

3.

The park was filled with faces I had not seen before. Later, I will make friends with one of them on the bus. She would rest her head on my shoulder throughout the journey whenever she wanted to nap. When the bus to convey me and others came, I knew I was going to suffer. We had not left the park when the driver started shooting the words out that he cannot carry a “big person o.” People ignored him. We jumped into the bus and minutes after, we zoomed out of the park; Akwa-Ibom bound.

We crossed states and seas, from Ondo to Delta to River Niger to Abia to Aba to Owerri and others I lost count of. Rain caught us on the road and the bus started leaking at the top. The driver threw some towels at us and told us to “hang” them, as though there was a holder. “I will fix it o, it just started leaking yesterday o.” Lord only knows how many yesterdays have passed for the man.

We kept moving. In the evening, we got to somewhere in Benin and the driver said we would relax and eat. We did relax but couldn't eat because a spoonful of rice was N1000. And I’m not a ritualist, so I bought a biscuit and a bottle of water. Minutes later, we continued. We met the road safety corps, they let us through. There's someone who knew them on the bus that at every checkpoint, they let us through. We called him Sure Plug.

We started talking about how life would be in camp. I joined them even though I knew I was not “fit” to stay there. I didn't want to miss out on the exhilaration bustling in their stomachs. Someone said the NYSC orientation camp in Akwa-Ibom is one of the best in Nigeria as she found out in her research. I didn't say much but heard a lot.

It's dark now and it was at that moment it occurred to me to check my phone; 7:30 pm. I had not observed a prayer since morning. We asked the driver, are we going to get there today? He didn't respond. He just kept driving. When we reached Delta, he stopped again for us to eat. I used the time to pray. I was hungry but I couldn't get food because I was praying. So I continued hungry. And we kept moving. We kept moving. Until the driver stopped in the middle of a starkly dark road. He said they'd closed the road, so we'd sleep here. Where? We asked. He didn't respond. He placed his head on the wheel. We started dispatching from the bus. Some got down to stretch their legs and some went to ease themselves. I was looking for food. We exchanged laughs and words of how we had never experienced this in our lives. “NYSC, you do this one,” someone said.  And I wondered how easily they could still manage to smile, in this lonely dark space, where we could sleep at night and not meet our bodies in the morning. My eyelids became negative magnets; they didn't come together till morning.