“I was born in Ibadan, went to primary and secondary school there and only ever left the city to attend college in Ogbomoso. I first left Ibadan for Ogbomoso to school in LAUTECH in 2004. Right after I got my undergraduate degree, I moved to Lagos. My parents wanted me to serve in Ibadan as well and I had the choice of staying, but I decided against it because I didn’t want to limit myself. Really, I left Ibadan because I wanted to change environment. It was there, in Apapa, Lagos that I had my Youth Service program and I was retained at my place of primary assignment upon completion of the program. That was how it was that I was in Lagos till 2012 when I left for the US.
After staying for 5 years in the US, I can tell you that the flexibility of American life is exciting! Gosh, America is a country where you can be one thing and everything at the same time, career-wise. I worked in Nigeria for a few years and I know it’s extremely hard to get a job. I also know that when you have a job, you rarely ever see people switching jobs often because the opportunities just aren’t there.
Since coming here, I have worked three jobs (two were Fortune-classified companies) and it’s so easy to just pick up and leave your current job for something more exciting. It staves off the feeling of being rooted in one spot and not advancing. I also love the ease of life and how organized things are. If you need an item, you know exactly where to look for it and how to get it. Everything is less chaotic and less stressful. Let’s not forget the constant supply of electricity too!
Being away from home totally opens one up to strange experiences one would never have had if one never left home. Some weeks ago, I was driving home from work and a guy cut me off abruptly and kept weaving in and out of my lane. I was pissed and started honking at him, but instead of apologizing, this POS flipped me off (AKA middle finger, AKA f@%k you!).
I was really pissed and had it being that I was back home in Ibadan, I would have pulled some James Bond stunt on him and insulted the living daylights out of him. But I remembered that in America, almost everybody has a gun, they carry it everywhere and they usually don’t hesitate to use it. Plus I have a son and a husband that I love more than life itself waiting for me at home, I don’t want to be the latest road rage incident, so I just let him go in peace.
“When my son turned one, we were going to have a birthday party for him and so we bought a cow to share between us and two other families. My husband had to go to Fresno to get the cow and it took him the whole day to even get the cow home. He had to pay people to kill the cow, pay people to skin the cow, pay people to burn the hair off the skin and so on. The laughable, annoying and frustrating part of the whole story was that they didn’t cut the cow up into small pieces. They left it in huge chunks, like 50lbs chunks so big that I could not even carry some of them. I was livid when my husband brought the cow but I couldn’t show it because he had gone through so much to even get the cow home and he would be mighty pissed if I said anything.
So I called a Nigerian lady up and she told me there was a Mexican butcher shop in town that can cut the beef up for us and slice the legs and so on. When I called up the shop, they charged me $380 to cut the cow!!! And that was how my husband, our friends and I turned into butchers at 11pm. We went to the store and got brand new knives and we worked and worked slicing pieces of meat! I just kept lamenting on how this won’t have happened if it was back home in Ibadan.
The little things we take for granted.
Q: How has living in America rubbed off on you?
Living here has rubbed off of me a lot. There were some things I did back home that when I think about it, makes me cringe or scream inwardly. The first thing is queue jumping. When I was an FOB (Fresh Off the Boat), I would walk into a building and you will see people just standing against the wall or a queue with a huge gap in it. I never knew they were on a queue there I would just proceed to join the queue without waiting my turn. Most times, they never said anything, just looked at you like you were crazy! Lol.
The second one: Holding the door for people. It felt really weird and absurd when people held the door for me. When I was in graduate school, people, even my professors would hold the door for me to get in or out. It was amazing. Now, I do it without even stopping to think.
Third, addressing people by their first names instead or Sir/Ma or Mr/Mrs something. It felt weird to call my general manager by his first name and not adding his title. I felt queasy doing that for a long, long time.
African timing is another one. I used to do that a lot back home, but I can’t do that anymore here. If you have an appointment for 8, you better show up at the venue by that time or call them to warn them of your lateness.”
