I’m a bustle person. You’re probably wondering what that even mean. It means I’m fast paced. I love the thrill of running time and seeing people jump from places to places. The rush hour, I love it, it’s music to my soul and adrenaline in my veins.
I can do tons of things simultaneously, for example, cook a meal, work on an assignment, listen to music while at this same time scheduling another meeting for the next hour. I remembered in late January and early February, I was in Lagos to attend the Elevate Your Game conference organized by the human capital development expert, Oyindamola Johnson. I was also there after being selected as a Next Generation Female CEO by Sesewa and we had daily meet-ups that lasted few days. Whenever I’m going home by the end of the day, I get immersed in the Lagos night life, the city that never sleeps, trying to catch the bus and surviving on roadside junk foods. I was born and grew up in a rural community, I never got to experience such and it’s fascinating. I close my eyes and pretend the car horns and speakers blasting are musical sounds from a Rio festival and I was in the center of it all, dancing and living life.
That is me, the rush makes me feel alive and functional. But for the past two months, I haven’t felt that way.
It started when school announced closure as a result of the corona outbreak in Nigeria. We had exams coming up the following week and being a law student, my faculty have this rule of concluding our papers in the first week. It was both a blessing and a curse in the sense that when other students are busy reading, you’re through with yours but the downside is that you have to start reading earlier and consequently have to read more because you cover the largest course unit in the entire university.
Even my Enactus team and I had plans, one of the projects I’ve had running since 2018, Project Rebirth, is focused on training low income earning women in vocational skills to provide them an opportunity for financial inclusion, gender equality and poverty eradication. We were to begin another batch of the project with new beneficiaries in late April till mid-May. We all even agreed to stay back in school after exams because the target audience are women living in the area.
But then everything went south. On Friday, the state government announced closure, by Saturday, hostels are being closed and students were leaving for home. I got to my apartment as I live off campus, dropped few clothes in my bag and left for home, hoping everything will go down in two weeks, three weeks max and I’ll be back in school. Oh well, how wrong was I?
The early days of the break was fun. For students like myself who saw it as a second chance to adequately prepare for exams, I jumped into action, dived into the legal maxims, learnt at least, three judicial precedents and legislative sections to buttress my points in the exam hall. There’s also this popular belief among Nigerian law students that your fourth year result is what qualifies you for law school and stands as your official undergraduate CGPA. If this is true, then I don’t know why we needed an extra year called “500 level” but one can never be too careful. It was fun, I was reading.
The second and third week came and the government extended the lockdown and jokingly, some people called it ‘lockdown pro’, like the iPhone series but for me, reality began to set it. I had loosened my braids before leaving school and so my hair is undone, the lockdown meant I can’t visit my hair stylist. Though afro hair are gorgeous, they can be a pain. We were not resuming any soon and social gatherings were banned scrapping the owambe weekend party option.
Since I’m a productive person, I downloaded Duolingo and began leaning French. At least, I should come out of this lockdown sounding like an African Marion Cottilard, also, it can boost my CV as I work towards the goal of being polyglot. For the sake of post COVID-19 summer bodies, I also joined a group of friends for virtual workouts.
April to early May was dramatic. I started babysitting my nephew whose mother works as a nurse. Since he’s barely two, communication is most times difficult. I don’t know when he wants to use the toilet or when he’s just being a prankster and babies, you neither can’t beat nor disown them, just dance to their tunes and my nephew, he always have a field day driving me crazy. Now, I’m reduced to a diaper changer. Thank you Corona Virus.
Also, as a young leader, I had applied for several opportunities last year, earlier this year and the results were coming in. Most of them go in the line of “We thank you for taking out time to apply for so so and so as it was amazing to read about young people changing the world, including you. We had 6000 applications from 169 countries and the selection processes were rigorous as we had just 20 spaces available. Unfortunately, you have not been accepted into this fellowship/leadership training/conference/everything at this particular time”. For anyone who have gone through these application processes, I’m sure they can relate.
And then, I found myself drowning. Reading wasn’t working anymore because aside from my law books, I had read other 5 books focusing on leadership, feminism and governance in this lockdown. My bustle was gone and I desperately wanted it back.
I literally though I was dying on the inside as a friend asked how I was, my response was “I’m just trying to get out of bed these days”. My days were filled with Zoom calls and meetings (first thing I'm doing post COVID-19 is to uninstall zoom)
The internet wasn’t helping either. Several things were trending and they were not good news at all. A girl was gang raped by 5 men, a woman suffering from postpartum drowned her one year old plus baby and reported herself to the police. She said she had wanted to study law but the baby prevented her from going after her dream. This led to the discussion about Nigeria making provisions for some laws that allows women to make choices about their bodies such as safe abortion and contraceptives.
Irrespective of all the tussle, there were silver linings though. In the same lockdown, I spoke at a virtual conference with speakers from seven other countries, I organized several online classes to provide access to soft skills such as project management, content creation, article writing and going global for young people, an African Union Advisory council member, Petrider Paul also chose me as her mentee. I fell so much fitter than I’ve been since becoming a teenager and I can now understand some French movie dialogues without English subtitles.
What this taught me is that in everyone is the ability to change their world but if you can’t see it, you cannot make it happen. We are still in lockdown but I know I will survive this. The sun is coming out of the horizon soon.
How are you fighting your unseen battles in this lockdown? Let me know in the comment section
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