Your Enviroment, Your Doom?

He looked me with a very queer, but slightly worried look in his dirty brown eyes, “You can’t imagine the questions I saw when I was there today,” he said. His name is Ikechuckwu, one of the random boys in my very secluded area. I have no friends here, no cool ones actually, but once in a while when I go out to get fruit or other random things, we usually just chat away on the way back home. I knew him when we first moved into the area back in 2005. He was one of the first boys I met when we settled. My house had no fence then, so we played football together, and he also came to fetch water at our place. There were also two other boys, his brother inclusive. As time went by, we(my brother and I) went to school, the house fence came up, with barbed wire even, the house became larger and finer than theirs, and the communication was broken. Class had been declared. My dad didn’t want me to talk to him because, well, he’s a street boy. My dad is highly ‘security’ conscious.

I was surprised when he told me he was writing his WASSCE at this neighboring school as an external student. Matter of fact, I thought he was in the university already! So, I just listened on as he talked. “I saw the mock questions they were given at the school. The questions were so hard! Imagine this question..”, he cocked his head in an upward position holding his fingers against his mouth as if trying to remember something very important. I chuckled. “Yes, I remember”, he said. “The question goes: If a train is traveling at 150 kilometers per second, abi minute, no, no, hour, yes, per hour, calculate the distance in meters per second”! I looked at him in shock, but didn’t say a word and just kept nodding my head in implied agreement. That was the hard question! As if that was not enough laughter for the afternoon, he continued, “A train! Can you imagine? Do you know how fast a train runs that they’re asking us to calculate, as long as a train is, they’re asking us to calculate”. I looked at the floor and smiled. I was having serious trouble controlling my laughter!

He went on to talk about the biology practicals he had the next week, but didn’t know the specimen to read on, and the literature he hadn’t read for, and so on. By the time he was done, I was glad to say my byes, but worried at the same time. Either way, however he turns out, he is part of Nigeria’s future. If he turns out otherwise than positive, do we blame him? In a world where the rich children are also competing to make it because they don’t want to rely on their parents’ fortune, where does Ikechuckwu stand?

I’m quite sure that taking Ikechuckwu to the mall would be like London to him. For someone with such poor exposure, how will he dream big? His big dream is probably to open up a barber shop like his brother, or sell food like his neighbor, or at most be a wealthy Igbo businessman. Finish! He doesn’t want to be another Nobel Laureate because…wait, what does ‘laureate’ mean? He doesn’t want to be a web designer because to him ‘to browse’ means to poop. Even as a trader, he can’t dream farther than what he can see around him. So when we write a list of under-achievers, do we add Ikechuckwu’s name?