CAUGHT UP IN THE CROSSFIRE

Ikem woke up the next morning feeling so tired. The stress from the previous days' events were telling on his strength. He needed more rest after all, there were no quizzes or in courses to write. The days of midnight and early morning readings and revisions were over. He smiled and laid back again to rest his head. He looked round appreciating all the corners of his one room apartment for having been a good and patient host for six years. He looked at the blue reading table and chair at one corner of the room and remembered the many midnight candles burnt on top of the plastic material. He could still see some of the candle waxes rooted to the table at different corners. Most of his nights were spent there, reading, dozing off, waking up and trying to continue the reading. By the right side of the reading table were the hard copies of different intimidating medical textbooks. For a moment, he imagined how he had been able to read all the texts and scaled through all the examinations. He thought to himself whether he would be able to remember all he had learnt from the texts. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the different topics and the salient points in the Medical Anatomy Textbook. They are still fresh in his memory just for a few topics that needs constant revisiting. He shifted his attention to his kerosene stove and the darkened pots. The cooking stove and the pots were most helpful in his first and second years. The reading and the exams were not that intense and friends sometimes offered to cook. However, the third year through to his final year were very tedious and demanding that cooking seemed a waste of precious time. The easily cooked indomie and the poorly cooked rice jollof rice made most part of his cooked menu. The rest of the menu was filled with soaked garri and groundnut, biscuit flakes and junks. 

He recalled the night his kerosene finished while he was cooking jollof rice. He was still parboiling the rice when he ran out on kerosene. It was past midnight and his neighbor had travelled on that day. The only alternative to getting kerosene by that unholy hour was to leave his lodge and trek down to the next lodge down the road where one student sells kerosene. So he decided to sieve the water off the rice and then added some salt to the poorly cooked rice and ate it out of severe hunger. He giggled. He remembered the words of one of his professors "The journey is not for the feeble-minded". 

photo credit: youngblackhealers.com