Sometimes, it's hard to describe how the last year was for me. Indeed, it was an opportunity to experience new places and meet new people, but the events didn't unfold as I had anticipated. And it all makes me wonder what could have been a little different if I could have helped.
I was perplexed about the idea of leaving for a year for national service. It was going to displace me, and I wasn't exactly comfortable with that thought, especially that I'd be somewhere I didn't know anything about. And then, just a few days before, I learnt I was supposed to travel a 12-hour journey to Rivers State for service. My perplexity tripled.
I had zero idea what it was going to be like in Rivers State. I had no family or friends there. I was just going to go directly to the orientation camp. And then I had to hastily prepare to travel and get on a bus. Eventually, I got to camp at midnight.
I totally loved being at camp. I barely got enough sleep most times, but I had a thrilling experience. And the idea of being with total strangers and wearing the same thing as everybody brought some form of equality amongst us. It was the shortest and longest three weeks of my life. So much happened in such a short time.
The real experience started when I was posted somewhere different from what I hoped for. I had no idea what where I would spend the next year felt like, but the more discouraging fact was that I was going to teach in a school. You should have seen the vexation on my face.
Soon enough, I made peace with being a teacher rather than a graduate engineer for real at an oil company or something. What I had in mind was where I'd lay my head.
In the last year in Rivers State, I lived in different rooms and with different people, all of which happened abruptly. And it was all because corpers, for whatever reason, don't actually have government-provided accommodation. For most of my time, I was uncomfortable.
It was, however, very interesting to eventually live in a big compound with people in my age group. It was far more thrilling and entertaining to be with my fellow corpers. There were laughs, parties, fights, make-up and break-ups, and pretty much everything in between. The sad thing was that we had to join the community in their problems with electricity and security.
Back at my place of primary assignment, it was another experience. It was in this one year that I realised that I really do not enjoy teaching secondary school students. I wonder if anyone really does. Perhaps it's because I was hardly paid anything for my work there. To them, I was already being paid by the government.
The government, on the other hand, was giving me monthly allowances that could only last me for two weeks on feeding.
Why then go through all of that for national service? I wonder sometimes. Well, apparently, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme main goal is to foster unity in the country. They do this by deploying youth corpers to different states of the country to interact with other tribes and people.
I am not sure about other people, but I believe that goal has been achieved to some degree. I say this because I knew nothing much about other tribes or even cared much to see what their cultures were like.
Being a Yoruba man and spending all my life in the west, I had much enlightenment about tribes I didn't even know existed, learnt that there are way more dialects than there are even languages in Nigeria, and tasted foods of different forms. It was an exciting experience, despite how much I missed where I was from and the foods I was used to.
Language isn't much of a strength for me, but I could at least learn what certain languages sound like and where they're from. Nigerians may sound all the same to foreigners, but we sure as heaven sound different with our many tribe accents.
It was in the south-south region that I first heard something like, "You sound like a Yoruba man."
All of that gave me a wider scope of what my country truly is like in some places; what other people from other tribes think of my tribe as well—like how Yoruba people tend to always spice up all their foods.
So do I think that NYSC is still worth it? Totally. You just don't want to keep your hopes high. Would I change anything about my experience in the last year if I could? Well, not really. Every good and bad thing and everything in between that happened to me taught me something, and it all helped me become better. As for the monthly allowance, they really should triple it. The economy isn't smiling.