I was balanced and prepared for the oncoming shot in my blue pair of khaki shorts and a white shirt. My school bag, sandals, stockings, and I think, my school cap, lay along the roots of the ixora bush which formed a thick half fence, separating the field from the classroom blocks. I followed the ball as it came - red hot as a thunder bolt - diving to my right to save my team from conceding a goal. I did trap the ball but the force of the ball, coupled with the force that propelled me from the centre of the goal post to the right, shoved me altogether to bury my face into the stemy and branchy ixora bush.
My teammates cheered me for saving the ball but when they noticed I tarried longer than 20 seconds, they knew that all was not well. Supulchi, a fat boy, my friend, whose mother was a teacher in the school, together with my other teammates came to help me up.
As I stood up, I gathered my sandals and begun to slot my feet into my socks. They weren’t happy; they too began to dress as pupils of Auntie Margret International School. But, mention must be made that we had scored a lone goal. Oorah!
At home, I told my father what transpired on the field, and he recounted how he almost lost his eye as a keeper in his secondary school days. He had positioned like I’d. The ball was on ground level in the “eighteen”, so he dived for it. “A wicked opponent”, he said, “wanting to kick me and the ball into the net, unleashed the string of his foot missing the ball but not my brow.” That was why he quit football. I decided to also quit. I was in Primary 4 that year.
The next time I caught myself on the pitch was in an inter-house sports competition, in my last class in Junior Secondary School. Funnily, I’d always loved to be the goalkeeper but there was one more capable than me, Emmanuel Ezejesi, taller and more strongly built. He was the son of my father’s friend. And when we wrote the schools Common Entrance Examinations, he had beaten me by half mark to clinch the second position.
As the match continued between Red House, my house, and Purple House, whose House Master was always fond of screaming “make a goal…. Make a goal for Purple House”
unfortunately and amusingly, his house clinched the last position
, on a field smaller than my primary school's, I, the lone defender with the goal keeper sighted, the ball coming from the opponents half. It was on my face level. Many thoughts ran through my thirteen year old mind: “head the ball... but you know, you’re afraid." "Let the ball smash your face… but you know it’ll hurt crappily." "Run from the ball… but the spectators will laugh at you”. Before my mind could think on the fourth option, I’d already executed it. I slammed the ball with my left hand to the ground. It saved me from hurting my face and earned my team a penalty while earning me a immediate substitution. All the same, my spectators booed.
In Senior Secondary School, my teachers often complained about my unindulgence in sporting activities, and my singular defense was “my parents paid my fees for me to study my books."
Although, not popular in school for sports, I was quite a name in the Staff Quarters Football Club. Then, I stayed with my mother in the quarters. One Sunday, my mother having gone on a weekend to our family house in Calabar where were my father and siblings, in the mid-afternoon, beside the tap, on a patch of bald lawn: we were playing a local match.
There was this tall opponent of mine Jo-Co, with his brother, Bufah, bigger than me and other members of my team. I was the strongest defender of the time, and Jo-Co had promised to take me down. He brought the ball to my box. I was very ready for him but he was readier. He feigned to shoot the ball and I grasped the opportunity with my calculation to return the shot but alas! The great toe of my right foot and the one next to it, crashed against his ankle. I fell to the floor. I felt the greater pain when first aid was applied and I limped badly home. I had quit my career on a football pitch.
Today, I found myself on another pitch afterI’d quit for nearly six years. As a defender in the football days, I was to ensure the ball didn’t get past me to the goalkeeper or the net. But now, I was both the sole defender and goalkeeper, even a striker. I was alone on the pitch facing not up to an eleven man team, all aimed of getting their ball into my net.
I wasn’t alone, no doubt. Thirty or so of my colleagues were in their individual boxes to defend against the same opponents. All dressed gorgeously, three defenders were called in at a time to face the team who sat on the other side of the mahogany table that made the game resemble that of table tennis. I was to be the last defender but when the first fumbled, Jesus says in the Holy Bible, “the last shall be the first”. The captain of the opponent’s team, Prof. Joe Ushie, I think, fired his first shot of question. I trapped and answered it. He fired another and a third. Hearing the sound from a distance, one would think a rocket launcher was being unleashed. Two or three others tried their slots, too weak to get past me, though I was fully prepared, and they acknowledged it. That game was my undergraduate project defense.
The process of writing that project which I defended: "Discourse Analysis of Selected Sermons of Pst. W.F. Kumuyi and Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio" wasn’t a rose of beds or bed of roses. The first topic approved for me by my supervisor was: "Discourse Analysis of Selected Classroom Discourse in Calabar"; when I had written up to the third chapter, she ruled her red ink stick across my foolscap papers, claiming not to ever have approved such a “baseless topic”. I was flabbergasted and abashed but resolute to be the first to submit my project.
I began writing again on the new topic; I got to my third chapter. Tragedy! Out of a Tagalog kilig for my sister on whose shoulder the home culinary burden that once rested on mine was fully seated, I offered to assist her chop the vegetables in the tray while she did the dishes. As an expert, I began to chop them with reckless abandon and click! I sliced off the head of my right thumb just from where my nails were chewed off.
Had I kept long nails like I always tried to, the accident would have been avoided or minimized. My flesh never could be found among the chopped leaves, but I have the feeling that one of us would have had it as an additional chunk of meat in his soup bowl.
I couldn’t write for a whole month. As Christians, we're taught to believe that such tragedies are the activities of Satan, the devil. The Muslims contrarily believe that it is God’s work with this slogan, “in Allah bia yarda ba, ba zia faru ba”. That’s true even in Christianity because our Bible tells us that no one hair of ours would fall to the ground without God’s permission, and shows us how God permitted Satan to afflict Job. But, we don’t accuse God as the direct subject except a devil's solicitor would want to plead it as vicarious liability.
Finally, my project with defended and I walked out of the defense hall with a high head amidst commendation from the panel. I later saw that I had an A in my project. That was in the second or third week of 2018. I proceeded immediately to the department's mobilization office, got an NYSC mobilization form, filled and submitted, and began a career of pestering my HOD to forward our results to the Senate. The results were finally approved by the school's senate on either 31 July or 31 August. Most of our colleagues whose departments operated on a greater speed frequency had left for service since March, and here we were hoping to go in October.
As my anxiety about the National Youth Service Corps grew, I joined a Facebook group about NYSC matters. They uploaded salient information about opening of registration, printing of Green Card, medical reports, opening of Orientation Camp, etc. At that point, my phone was so dear to me that once, I was easing myself of some hot soluble but solid matter: holding my phone between my lips as a source of light to observe what went out me – like a keen mother observes her baby- before flushing it down to the soak away pit, a drop of water revolted from the waste receptor and stood on my upper lip, like a stubborn fly. In the same flurry of actions, I spat out to prevent the liquid from getting any further, and down went my phone into the dungeon like Jeremiah in the Holy Bible. I damned all consequences and rescued my beloved phone. That was the day information came to print out Call-up Letters.
I was satiated with mixed feelings based on obscene stories I’d read from the internet in a bid to get acquainted with life in the camp. One that really crazed me was how the Camp Commandant coercively lured a Corps member and penetrated his exit-hole with the help of oil. Although afraid of the military, I was determined to bite hard at the piston of anyone who’d dare me, in a bid to offer a generous BJ. Nevertheless, I continued to be as optimistic as I could.
