I had just moved into this Government
Secondary School to start my SSS 1. Dad felt I would do better in sciences, the
new school offering an advantage. The afternoon I was offered admission, barely
a 14 year old and naïve, so boneless that the hostel master proposed I stayed
with him in Staff Quarters until I had reasonably tooled myself to the social environment.
After few weeks, I could file into the hostel with a healthier spirit. Hostel Master
surely wanted me to filter through this school flawlessly. He told me he would pair
me with a responsible boy, someone of good character. So he called in a boy, Kuhe.
Kuhe was about my age, SSS 1 too. When I moved into his room, we became buddies.
He was such a neat-looking boy, intelligent too. So, our friendship began to soar
in the exciting elegance of a promising future.
When Kuhe was made Health Prefect in
our SSS 2, I had also been nominated, it was still welcoming- he being the prefect
was same as it would be me. And often, we went administering discipline together.
Our friendship
would blink slightly when a boy called Coolio joined our class from another
school, a school we respected enormously. Coolio became an instant pointer to our
way of life. Like the day I smoked my first stick of Benson & Hedges to the
stub, dragging the fume into my lungs with urgent vigour to prove to my peers I
wasn't a bush-boy, that evening in town, it was Coolio who bought that cigarette.
He had bought for all of us; and I watched Kuhe too, now called the Amorous Guy,
smoulder his first cigarette between his lips, tongue manoeuvring the smoke
until it was delicately sent down the throat. It looked good watching the smoke
emerged gracefully from his nostrils, then lost into the air. Indeed, we held the
airs of the world with the flapping wings in our minds.
That first Benson & Hedges would
also be my last. I am not sure of where the smoke I had dragged in went to but my
brain was spinning and I had lost vision for almost five minutes.
I had remembered reading Napoleon
Hill, Think and Grow Rich, said how
critical it was for people to protect their minds; he insisting a healthy mind as
the powerhouse for which great people built greatness. I had desired greatness
from childhood. And feared the next stick of cigarette would nut up my brain, ruin
my mind forever. So when Coolio offered another stick, I said, 'No, thank you…'
And although I continued to hang with this family,
I never had the conviction to dare a cigarette again.
Smoking cigarettes in the hostels had
assumed a hallowed culture, many more students were soon initiated. In fact, a boy
who had smoked the highest sticks, who kept the most studs during a term took
home a prize of a box of cigarettes. We were floating in a shoulders-high world,
a world kilometres away from the knowing of school management, even farther from
Hostel Master. We were a bunch of Senior
Boys manning our lives.
In SS3, when Coolio, Amorous Guy and other
friends started smoking Indian Hemps (weeds) in the hostels, and in the classes
at night, it was a belated invention.
Amorous had moved to smoking weeds!
This story is raw, undoctored. In the
fast pacing 21st-century-honoured civilization, in the modernized life of freedoms,
it appears disgracing to say much without boxing truth into privacy. And this
newness of civilized society that comes with scarcity of boldness to fully open
up in stories of this kind, we starve the upcoming generation the salvation truth.
But movies can show actors starring nudity, promoting drug abuse.
And, this story is not a
self-righteous sermon; it is an appeal. It is not a mockery but a cry.
I was a 200 Level engineering student
when I went home one afternoon and saw Amorous Guy ambling the streets of our
town a psycho. Tattered. He was fishing items from a garbage heap. A mad man!
When I graduated from the university,
distinguished myself in a national programme and was invited to the Villa to
meet with the President, I sat in the Banquet Hall with teary eyes. I remembered
my friend Amorous, a man who once as a boy held better promises than I, a boy
who merited Health Prefect when I could not, the boy whose fortune a stick of cigarette
circumvented.
One of the boys whom we had that
first cigarette together, a dear friend, would later be shot dead by the police
after a robbery when I was in 300Level. I still remember his cute smiles, a tall,
thin handsome boy.
I will never forget Ahua, a really
cute teenager. He was the friend who brought spirit drinks to School Assembly
ground, those drinks sizing comfortably in his pockets. We were about to write
our Junior School Certificate Exams, and had reasonable liberty- when we were allowed
to prepare for our coming exams. Ahua soon became our role model, bringing and
sharing for us those spirits. And right there on the school assembly ground, in
our no-longer-small-boys cluster, we
would empty those bottles into our throats as we waited for staff to arrive the
assembly ground. After I had transferred from that school, I learned Ahua had dropped
out soon. Years later when I graduated from secondary school, I would see this
role model boy in town often, now completely lost to alcohol- a drunkard. I had
ran into him morning after morning emerge from a beer joint where he had forgotten
himself the previous night. At present he looked sickly, yet drank to stupor.
The morning his corpse was found cold in a dirty street gutter, it was still
oozing of a local gin.
The same is the story of Gwarol, a
brilliant young English teacher- a friend I dearly loved for his intelligence. Gwarol
and I would sit, eating hours mapping our world-changing solutions. His stories
of Nelson Mandela, J.S Tarkaa, Mahatma Gandhi and the likes, were ever inspiring.
Gwarol and I nursed a dream to own a university and planned buildings reaching
the skies on half the land mass of our town. That was before I went to the university,
before beer soaked away his courage to face his life any longer, before death
stole him. When his lifeless body lay frozen, full of skeleton, eyes sunken to defeat,
houseflies buzzing around, no one would ever imagine a young man once with tall
beautiful dreams.
There is the story of Ortoho, a
former judge stolen to the liberty of retirement, gradually lost to alcohol,
then lost to the grave.
We have lived with these stories, our
minds quaking each time we see or remember a loved one gradually slipping away
in the addiction of drugs. We try to contend our agonies, maybe hide them
helplessly.
The delicate part of drug abuse is
not the certainty that in continuation, it ends sadly, often in death
(primarily or consequently). Fearfully, it is the lost of active control over
your mind while you walk in life.
Is a beer, a harmful drug? The simple
green bottle we take to calm our nerves when frustration emerges? Is the
ordinary stick of cigarette freely sold in the streets harmful to the body?
Lately, there are all manners of drug abuse out there, from syrups to powders, to
liquors. And the young ones have access to them.
When we came up with the Stop
Drug-Abuse Campaign (SDC) at the
Abuja Business Clinic, it was not to enforce stoppage of drug abuse. It was to
provide an alternative route to addressing a national challenge, indeed a
global challenge. An alternative where love is the tool for finding the root causes,
from individual perspective, why someone sank into drug abuse and possibly retool
such struggling minds with enterprising solutions. If this fellow sinking down has
better pictures or reason to live healthier, hope to aspire to in life, would s/he
still thread the path of drug abuse? So, we have come up with a Drug-abuse Control
School where graduates, former drug-addicts, trained, become ambassadors of the
SDC, and are provided with a toolkit to head the entrepreneur's way. Now, we
need your support and partnership.
You or your organization can sponsor the
training and support the reframing an addict.
DO
YOU THINK YOU NEED DRUG COUNSELLING? WE HAVE A TEAM OF PSYCHOLOGISTS AND
MEDICAL DOCTORS YOU CAN ALWAYS CONFIDE IN!
