One thing I realised about living in university hostels within campus is that you would have to develop the ability to tolerate a lot of things, and that includes frequent invasions of your peace of mind.
When I gained admission to the university I recently graduated from, I stayed in the campus hostel. I wasn't new to the experiences I would have, since I was coming from a boarding secondary school—a boy's military one, in fact. I had had the roughest life, so I was kind of prepared. What was different this time was that we all had access to things like music boxes, unlike in secondary school.
Right where you may be, in a room of six people accommodating ten, you could have one person playing gospel music in one corner of the room and another playing secular music in a different corner of the same room. How harmonious this experience was every time. Sike!
Now, not only would one have to deal with people playing different sounds from their electronic devices and mobile phones, but you could very well have someone who's so excited singing random songs around your window. All these and more were part of the reasons I felt that I needed to leave the campus residence environment for something more private off-campus.
It took the second year to finally make the move to leave, after dealing with even worse situations in a less-conducive hostel building that I found myself in. Choosing the right place became a challenge.
I found a place that seemed apt for me to stay. It was reasonably far from the general populace of students, implying that there would be fewer inconveniences like parties, random visits by police to catch fraudsters, and fewer vehicle noises. I found myself a gem, or so I thought...
A one-story building was what I found, and I took a spot upstairs. It had two open windows on the wall that were adjacent to one another. I could see and hear more than most people because of this "privilege" I had. What I didn't expect were the potential problems to come.
I had a family of neighbors. They had two kids, and those ones were the connoisseurs of the music I had to listen to every day, especially in the early mornings.
For whatever reason, these kids cried so much every now and then. Kids cry uncontrollably when they are unhappy, and these ones did it so regularly that I often had to deprive myself of fresh air in the middle of a very hot day to reduce the noise coming from the kids through my window.
Now, the cries of these kids were not always what disturbed me from that side of my room. The same family had such loud speakers that the songs they played from them felt like they were right in my head. I would hear a particular playlist of songs, so much so that the songs began to irk me whenever I heard them. Might I add that they ran a school too, and that those kids played so much and, you know, made a lot of noise during their breaks? Well, I would then deal with that for another four years until I graduated and left the place.
The second window was usually peaceful. The catch, however, was that it wasn't always that way all year. There were usually times when some churches would run crusades, where they'd conduct open programmes with loud speakers, and there were community festivals of some sort. The noises from those alone ran me crazy on some nights. Some of those nights were during the time we had our examinations.
One night, during one of the crusades, I stepped out to inform them that their volumes were a tad bit too high for the comfort of the residents around. They were watching a movie projected on a screen, had the audio connected to loud speakers, and then turned up the volume so high.
How on earth was I supposed to enjoy the audio of a movie without even seeing what they were all watching? It was happening at night, so I could afford to close my windows, even in the absence of electricity, because it was a bit cool. Closing the windows did nothing, however. It was all too unbearable. I needed to study in the middle of that. I went out to the media team to ask them to turn it down. They complied, although it was still disturbing, and I was able to read that night.
A similar thing happened with the community festival that happened all night one time. There was nothing I could do about that, so I had to listen to songs that I had never heard before and cared nothing about throughout one night.
Being a student is not just about studying and attending classes alone. There are experiences that make up for the general experience as a student, especially where I am from. It is part of why people feel this sense of liberation when they graduate from this conundrum that we term school. Thankfully, I was able to keep my sanity together amidst it all.