The Service Chronicles 7: Journey Travailing

I awoke with joy because I was going home but then I remembered I had to fetch water, grudgingly I dragged myself out of bed looked for a bucket for five minutes. I really need to buy one. 

Got to the well and met Michael; a fellow at the lodge sewing the pail used for fetching by the time he was done we were two people waiting for him and all three of us went to the well only to be greeted by sand, there was no water in the well. I never thought I would see such a wonder, an empty well. All my life I thought empty wells were things that only happened in the bible times; Ilorin has once again managed to prove me wrong.

 I ran to a tank and quickly got water from no other person than my water hero; Nnamdi. Had a hurried bath, finished my packing and joined devotion. After devotion said my goodbyes, still performed an ACF duty and ran to the park where Layo and Priye were almost impatiently waiting for me. Layo is a wonderful woman whom men have forced to be a polyandrist (not a real word?) and she really doesn’t want to be, I call her CLI (this is the nickname given to whomever is dating any CLO of any LGA) seeing as we like to tease her and call her the wife; wife o not girlfriend of the almost new CLO (Corper’s Liaison Officer) of Ilorin South. Priye is a friend of Layo’s, very pretty girl and she’s cool, I just met her yesterday.  While we waited for our bus to get full, Priye and I had this ultimate craving for puff puff. So a mini hunt began and right there on Unity road in front of Young Legacy (the bus park) we eagerly and patiently waited for a hawker of puff puff to pass by. Upon sighting one we again waited patiently for him to make his way over to us. Only for him to go another way, the way we yelled for him to come to us was a little bit frightening. In our defense we needed our fix and we had to get it immediately.  Few minutes after that we were on our jolly way to Lagos, immediately we got out of Ilorin I fell into a deep sleep only to be awaken to the screech of tires. 

The driver of the bus was apparently weaving his way between tankers. This man was a Yoruba James Bond. I was thoroughly frightened, every tanker we saw this man managed to overtake them. The pleas of the passengers didn’t stop him. He was on a mission and there was no way the fearful pleas of the people whose lives he could end by mistakenly crashing the bus would stop him; like I said Yoruba James Bond.  As we proceeded on our plane ride (the driver was going too fast for a bus) Layo, Priye and I played a little game where we imagined what we would have done if we had been posted to any of the village schools we passed. It was fun, it may not sound like much fun but what were we supposed to use to entertain ourselves? We couldn’t exactly play a game where we would guess the tanker our driver would hit, that would have been too mundane. Then we saw someone on his Khaki and imagined he had gone to get his final clearance. Fun stuff. 

About thirty minutes from Ibadan there’s this park were all buses stop for passengers to disembark and stretch their legs. Till now I don’t know the name of that place all I know is that it was the first place I ever saw orange bananas. When we got down we hurriedly paid for a twenty-naira-per-person toilet and got in. The guy in the Khaki apparently didn’t go and get his clearance he was journeying like us.

In another one and a half hours we were in Lagos, Yoruba James Bond/pilot had performed his magic. Only for us to enter Lagos and see all the traffic we skipped from Kwara, it took me two hours to get to my house from Berger. Imagine! Well I still love Lagos regardless of all her operating demons like bad roads, traffic and LASMA among many others. For crying out loud the only time I see serious traffic in Ilorin is when the train is passing. 

I got home in time and dragged my weary body to the bathroom. No DSTV subscription the bloody thing expired as I began the journey. Which is not fair; for three months or so I have being deprived of the luxury of proper cable TV. Only for my expectations to be cut short.

I watched some episodes of New Girl and Once Upon a Time; tried to download more but to no avail I was not successful. Jessica Day is my role model; she is almost everything I want to be.  But that cannot be seeing as she is completely fictional.

As my eyes drifted off to sleep, a message I saw jolted me awake. It seems to be that something is about to begin with an old flame and I’m a tad bit frightened.   

Nkem Oyaghire