Still chapter 1 - The Journey There

Everything was packed and ready to go. My mother has always been ultra-organized. The driver came to help carry the stuff down the two flights of stairs, out of the gated building and into the car on the street. Christian was always the driver assigned. He passed away suddenly three years later I remember him smoking quite a bit so that might have had something to do with it. I actually remember my father’s secretary calling to give us the news of his death. My mom was driving. I grabbed her cell phone from her purse, answered it and passed it to her. Then I heard her say “Bad news? God forbid!!” I immediately thought they were calling to tell us something had happened to my dad. I felt my throat tighten and my body go momentarily numb. Then she said “Oh my God! Christian? I can’t believe it! SCC what is happening to your staff?” – another one of their drivers had suffered a massive stroke a few weeks prior. I feel really bad for admitting it now, but I was relieved that it wasn’t bad news about my father. At that point in my life, my level of emotional affect was grossly underdeveloped. Unfortunately, it remained that way until very recently.

The drive there was what would subsequently mark my countdown to separation from “freedom”. First we had to get out of the city of Lagos and on to the Lagos/Ibadan highway towards Ogun State. We made this journey 44 times and every single time, i would lie on my mother’s lap and take intermittent naps. I don’t remember the last time lying on anyone’s lap felt that good. On the radio the news had just broke about President Bill Clinton admitting to having oral sex nine times with Monica Lewinsky. I couldn’t quite figure out what oral sex meant but I figured having it nine times must have been a really bad thing to do. I drifted back to sleep again and woke up when we arrived at the first of two toll gates. The traffic slowed. While we waited to pay the toll fee, there were tons of kids running from one car to the next hawking every snack and drink you could think of: cookies, chips, doughnuts and “gala” – the very famous Nigerian sausage roll which I never ate for fear that the meat in it was something other than meat. We usually bought digestive cookies and some orange fanta.

Passing the first toll gate meant we had entered Ogun state. After Abeokuta – the city of rocks, we drove down a really long stretch of road that went up, then down, then up, then down again. I fell asleep. The traffic slowed again at the second toll gate; waking me up and reminding me that we were almost there. I never understood why that gate was there. We were not at the border of any two cities. We turned left, went down a series of winding unpaved roads in ijebu-Ife, then a narrow road that led to what is now known as “Louisville Avenue”. We arrived at the red gates of Louisville Girls High School. A little old man opened the gates for us, letting us into the 60 acre piece of land where for the next six years I would build my life and the person that I have become today.

Chapter 1 - The first time

So on this day, exactly 12 years ago. I embarked on the most significant journey of my life to date. Needless to say, at the time, I had not even the slightest clue what I was getting myself into. It didn’t really matter. I was 11 years old. I was leaving home to go to the middle of nowhere and away from my mother and life as I had known it but that really didn’t seem to faze me at the time. I don’t have a lot of childhood memories. I’m not exactly sure why. I didn’t have a terrible childhood by any means so that rules out suppression. But for some reason I don’t seem to remember much about my childhood save for a few “catastrophic” events that stick out in my mind. To a child, every little mishap seems rather catastrophic.

I remember this day though. It was January 11^th 1998. Exactly one week before this day, I had gone to the barbershop to cut off all my hair. Everyone who knew me as a child knows I used to have really long pretty hair. Everyone who knows me now knows I can’t stand long hair. I guess after I cut it off that day it never came back

We left home around 8:00am. Home was my mother’s three bedroom apartment in Surulere, Lagos Nigeria. A driver from my father’s company came to pick us up. My mother did not want to drive long distance in her car. Long distance was an hour and a half. I remember the car. It was a Puegeot 504, painted green and white with the company logo and name: “SCC Nigeria Limited” on each side.

There were no teary goodbyes. There were no goodbyes at all if I remember correctly. The decision to go away to boarding school occurred rather hastily. In retrospect, it was not a well thought out decision by any means. Not for me at least. There were no discussions about what the whole processes entailed or even the consequences – the emotional consequences more than anything else. I just remember being really excited that I was going to get to have my own “stuff”. I was going to be away from home, my mother could not control me anymore and I would have my own “everything”. A few weeks before we set out for Ijebu Ife/Itele, we went shopping for the entire list of things that was given to us in the school’s prospectus. I can’t tell you how excited I was that all this stuff belonged to me! Even more exciting was the fact that we were instructed to put our names on every single item we owned.

I remember my mother painting “Aviram” on my metal bucket, plates bowls, cutlery and garden tools in pastel pink paint. She stitched my last name onto every article of clothing I was taking as well - including underpants. They were not joking when they said they wanted everything clearly marked. They were not joking about anything else either. In the prospectus, there was a list of rules and regulations that all students would have to follow, as well as a daily schedule. Very detailed, down to the quarter hour descriptions of what we would occupy our days with on weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays. I read it all before we set on our journey, but for some reason it did not occur to me, not even remotely what all these rules meant and that I would actually have to follow them. Every single one of them.

The brilliant idea to go to this particular school came from my aunt. I have no idea how she found out about it but she was going to send my cousin there so she told my mother about it. I was in my final year of elementary school known as “Primary six” – the nomenclature for the school system in Nigeria has changed now. Most people left elementary school and went to high school after completing primary five. For some reason I didn’t. We had not really discussed where i was going to go to high school come September.

After my aunt told us about this school, my mom arranged for me to write the entrance examination. On the scheduled day, she came to wake me up and I hesitated more than usual. So she said: “Do you not feel like going to write the exam?” I mumbled something that meant “no” and shook my head so she let me go back to sleep. I assumed that would be the end of that. Two days, later, the idea came up again. I guess my mom spoke to my aunt and there was still room for me to take the entrance test. I remember being very upset about having to miss school that day because our class was taking a field trip. We were going to go on a train. I had never been on a train and had been really excited to go. Now I take the subway to work every day but I still have never been on a train in Nigeria. That’s probably for the best, considering the condition the trains in that part of the world are in. Only worthless cargo should be allowed onto them.

To my surprise, I passed the entrance test. I had begun to doubt my academic ability at the time. In first grade, I was first in my class. Afterwards, I was usually somewhere between 2^nd and 5^th. Probably because I didn’t apply myself enough. At this point I was 3^rd place and my class was the smallest it had been - around 30 students. My mother was not impressed with my performance and I was really nervous to write the test so it was a much welcome relief to find out I passed. Afterwards, I remember arriving at my mother’s store and a friend sticking his head through the car window to ask where we were coming from. I replied out of nowhere “I’m going to boarding school.” So i guess that’s exactly how the decision was made. To this day, I’m not sure where those words came from but I had made the decision. It had to be approved by my father since he would be the one providing the funds. But that was not a difficult task. Tuition was the one thing he never complained about paying for. That was until I came to University in Canada.