Memory Lane.....Journal entry- My first visit to my state of origin. You can imagine how excited I was when my mom told me to get ready for a trip to my village. I was happy, I have always been curious to know how the state looked like, how the house in the village looked and if there were some distant relations I had not met. Well the d-day came, it was 2009-09-18, and everyone was in the jeep except Funmi and Abidemi who were in school. Somehow I felt the strike had favoured me because I knew this was a rare opportunity. Unlike most families in Nigeria who travelled back home during the Christmas holidays to celebrate as a family. My family was a distant one with family members scattered all over the globe, they never gathered together to do a reunion, and most importantly they know absolutely nothing about their culture or tradition. My grand dad lived his life in the Yoruba speaking states; Lagos and Ibadan to be precise, and married two Yoruba wives. So when he died, my grandmothers groomed their children in the Yoruba culture and it was easy for them since my dad and his siblings lived in Ibadan, my great grandmother was also a Yoruba woman, I guess the Udoms are so in love with the yorubas. Anyway, that is why my dad, uncles and aunties know nothing about Akwa ibom, people would say it is pathetic but they don’t care, they all accepted their mothers’ culture as their own. And it doesn’t matter to them as far as they can identify themselves with one Nigerian culture. So I also imbibed their character, when people seem curious about my name which is a mixture of Ibo, Yoruba and Ibibio, I simply shove in their curiosity and tell them I understand the three major Nigerian languages which is Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba. The journey started with a heated conversation between my dad and mom about a gate, our neighbouring street had fixed at our street. Dad was furious about it and wondered why they would extend their plans to our street, he hated their audacity. I kept quiet at the back seat, looking outside and feeling like a prisoner that had escaped from a routine prison. My life had become a boring routine since the strike started and I was desperate to change my environment, so dad’s anger did not mean anything to me that morning, all that mattered was me, myself and I. I tried to dose off but the bad roads won’t let me. It was a bumper journey all through till we finally left bori, a village in Port Harcourt. Then we zoomed off, we had to stop several times because the bribe collectors who are also called policemen were on the road serving and protecting themselves. At the several stops we made, dad would tip them with a 100 naira or 200 naira note and tell them it was for pure water, it irritated me and vexed my spirit. I mean I was really broke, and it was hard to recharge my phone, and these policemen just get tipped off with a selfish grin on their face. Finally we arrived akwa ibom, and dad did all his best to give me a brief detail about every major place we drove through till I got to my own Nsit Ubium. A sign board welcomed us with bold letters that read “welcome to Nsit Ubium”. Wow, my village rocks I soliloquized, I mean not every village has a sign board to welcome its people home. For starters, my mother’s village doesn’t have a welcome sign board. Our house was not far from the road side, it was the third house. I came out of the jeep and inhaled the fresh breeze of my roots. I was happy to have my feet on the soil of Akwa ibom. I saw udeme with her heavy stomach, it was unbelievable, and so she was truly pregnant. Let me do a brief introduction of Udeme. Udeme also called UD is my father’s cousin, the last child of her father. She use to stay with us but she was a trouble maker stealing, lying and just causing a lot of troubles. So mom ran out of patience and UD was sent back to the village, after 2 months, news came from the village that she was pregnant and after some weeks, her mother passed away. She is just 17 years old, so all I thought about was pity, she looked miserable with eczema all over her neck, her clothes were so dirty, they looked like rags, her hair was unkempt and yet when I reminded her of all the times I tried to advise her to behave herself, she just laughed ignorantly. Just then I started asking myself why some people enjoy poverty. I asked her who the father of the child was. She said he was a village photographer who had denied the pregnancy. Her father, whom we nick named papa meisere because whenever he visited us he was always trying to force the language into us, was a very well to do young man in his hay days. He was a journalist and had a good life; he went to different countries and even dinned with the queen of England, a fact he never fails to leave out when he is telling us the story of his life. He would have been a very wealthy man by now but he spoilt his prosperity by settling in the village without doing anything. He claimed he wanted to learn the language and make his children also learn the language. Over night, he turned into another man and refused his children the right to education, claiming education was a barrier to our culture and traditions. Sounds stupid, right? Well that is what he claimed and so all his children ended up like him. Udeme’s elder brother got a teenage girl pregnant without even having a means to livelihood. I saw the girl, she was really beautiful but poverty had stolen her beauty. If she had a better life, she would be a sweet sixteen. I looked at them and wondered why teenagers now become fathers and mothers; it’s like the order of the day in Akwa Ibom. We brought out the food, mom had made for papa, you needed to have seen the joy on his face, he told us he had not eaten a decent meal since last night, they rushed the food and asked for more. Papa meisere later told me more about my great grandfather. I got to know that he was a pastor who married a woman from a family that practised juju. What an irony! Anyway, we all chatted about a lot of things and then when it clocked two, we said our goodbyes and left. To papa meisere, it felt like his birthday but to me, it felt like Christmas. As they waved us good bye with smiles of satisfaction that would last till the provisions we got them finished, I pondered on their life and many questions was on my mind. Don’t they have dreams? Is this all they want to do with their life? Bringing children into the world to suffer in penury, will they ever come out of the village to experience another world? At that moment, I thanked God that I was sent from heaven to be my dad’s daughter, even though sometimes I wished for more, I was happy; I had my two parents alive to provide for me, we are an average family. Even though sometimes, I wish I could be like other cool kids who travelled all over the globe for an education or holiday tours, I was happy, I had visited some countries and I was always given a free pass to visit any state I wanted to visit, I had parents that could afford to pay my fees and clothe me. I thanked God silently in my heart, as we drove back to Port Harcourt.