Heroes | 2(a) -

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“I was born into a loving and caring family. My father was very educated and we lived, let me say, above average. We had the basic things: we had good food, we had clothes to wear, we were well behaved in the community, and curfew time was 7pm. It was a pretty decent life up until 2005. That was when I came in contact with life.

In 2005, my father was in his 70s. He had had an earlier marriage in the UK, which ended, and it had been upon his return to Nigeria that he had married my mother. I was the first son of his new marriage and second of five kids. I was out of secondary school and trying to figure out the next phase of my life. I got admission into University of Ilorin but before I could make things happen, it was too late. I had forfeited my admission. I didn’t tell people about it so a lot of my friends felt that I was in Ilorin. That meant that I had to rewrite JAMB.

I was planning to do this in 2005 when my father suffered a stroke and that was the start of many challenges. Gradually we began to sell things we owned to take care of my father’s hospital bills, pay my siblings school fees and to maintain the home. My mom’s business took a hit because she spent all of her time taking care of my father and so she couldn’t give the desired attention to her business like she should.

I wrote NECO GCE in 2005. My house was at Felele, my centre was at Eleyele and my father was hospitalized at St. Annes Hospital Molete. On days when I had papers in the morning, I would go by taxi to my centre then I’d trek to Molete to be with my father. That was so because things had gotten so difficult at the time that my mom couldn’t always afford to give me transport for a round-trip. So, yes, I’d trek to Molete from Eleyele and on some days, I’d even trek from Eleyele to home, Felele.

In the end when the results were released, it turned out that the result of my centre was cancelled. Then I had to decide whether to do remedial in Ilorin or stay back for another year to write fresh exams or just go on to the Polytechnic; and at the time I was unsure of which of the three options I’d settle for at the time. While I was still trying to figure this out, my father was discharged and was brought home.

I realized that I could not just sit by idly and watch my mother running around trying to sort things out for my dad and for us the children so I decided to step up to the responsibility. By stepping up, I mean, I took jobs. By jobs I mean odd jobs; jobs like cutting grass for people, going to buildings where construction was going on and helping them carry blocks.

The last odd job I did was one where they were building a house and there was a rainfall. The rain fell into the soak-away pit and we the workers were to scoop the water out of the pit. To get the task done, I jumped and began to scoop water and somewhere along the line, I almost got drowned. That was when I said, “no way!”

It was crazy.

The phase of my life was hard because of the stress I had gone through and it seemed nothing was working out. To not have my results released after all that trekking and having to study by my father’s hospital bed was a big blow. In the end, I settled for the polytechnic option since I couldn’t do the remedial in Ilorin. I could not even tell people what I was going through at the time because they were not asking questions because they wanted to help; they just wanted to know for knowing sake.

As a family, we stuck together and put up an appearance. I had wanted to study Petroleum Engineering or Industrial Chemistry before but since that wasn’t looking feasible anymore, I settled for Computer Science at the Polytechnic of Ibadan in 2006 and I got my ND in 2008.”