by Emelogu Godswill
I was a member of the 2015 Batch B stream 1 orientation course held at the NYSC Permanent Orientation Camp, Ikot Itie Udung, Nsit Atai LGA, Akwa Ibom State. The state coordinator did her best to keep the camp clean and went as far as picking dirt herself when she could. This, though, didn’t make everywhere clean but just manageable. It wasn’t long after I fell sick (I don’t always find myself in such an environment). I was already running the one week intensive training that was available for Peer Educator Trainers (PET) under the HIV/AIDS CDS group and as the liaison between the facilitators and the trainees, I was always worked up. Add that to my fever and flu and you had me.
I had gone to the camp clinic and after seeing one of the Corp Doctors who manned the clinic, I was given a piece of paper that indicated that I should be given one capsule of Amoxil once a day, one tablet of vitamin C and one capfull of cough expectorant daily (that was an unforgivable form of drug abuse). I just wanted to find out what the pharmacist would do; but when I went to meet the pharmacist who happened to be on call in Igbo, she brought out a card of Amoxil, asked me to take a capsule and gave me one tablet of Vit C. Eventually, when I told her that I can’t possibly take the drugs because it was a waste of time, when she inquired and I told her that I am a biochemist, she began to apologize and explain the clinic’s dilemma (no drugs).
Fast forward two days. My parents visited on my demand with real drugs and by then I was already having a reactionary skin rash. One night after they brought me drugs that included Benylin with Codeine (one of the side-effects is drowsiness), I came in from PET training exhausted and sick. I told the hall governor who shared the opposite bed to mine that I was really sick and asked for his prayers. I had to plug in my headset, and started playing Yanni; with the help of Benylin and its codeine content, I was asleep soon after.
After I had slept for a considerable time (probably around 11 pm, I think I slept around 9:45 pm or so), I was woken by a policeman who was hitting on my bed and pocking hands through the net and shaking me up to reality. When I became aware of my environment, I realized that the hostel was empty and deadly silent. I could hear the loud ranting of the RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major), whom they call Sergeant England, raining abuses to whoever it was. I was beginning to think it was 5 am already only for me to come to the veranda to the hostel and see every other person sitting on the floor. I didn’t know what the problem was, as I was bundled to the military quarters wearing only the boxer and singlet I wore to bed; I was not even wearing slippers. I was forced to sit down on the sand floor and I was told my crime was sleeping, when I was a snake charmer and killer.
I eventually realized that some people had killed a snake in the nearby hostel and had raised commotion. But the codeine in my system coupled with the Yanni blasting away in my ear and my weakness from running the PET didn’t let me wake up. I was now exposed to the cold blown directly from the Atlantic Ocean close by and it triggered my cough which immediately became whooping. I was told I was pretending and within the hour, the vehement coughing was making me cough out blood, but the military guys didn’t care. All they did was tell me they wished I would even die since I wanted to disturb the whole camp (disturb the camp for sleeping at the time appointed for sleeping when others made noise). My coughing irritated them and they kept telling me to shut up or die already. I couldn’t call anyone because I didn’t even have my phone on me (I had NYSC staff who could vouch for my character).
To cut the story short, I was there coughing and shivering for more than an hour until my hall governor whom I had told when I was going to bed discovered that I was not in bed after the military guys had released them. He remembered that one of his hall mates was dragged away while others sat on the ground. He came to the military quarters and told them the same story of my innocence as I had maintained it. The apology I got was “You don get luck, you for suffer”. I decided to take it up with them and the administration as far as it could get and had quickly texted my twin brother the narrative as soon as I got my phone but the hall governor prayed with me for my safety and advised I should see it as one of the challenges in life. If not for God, my story could have been that of the sick Akwa Ibom Corper who died because though he was sick, the untrained soldiers, who didn’t know the right approach to crime detection, had kidnapped him out of his hostel almost naked and left him under the cold weather for hours and not even his coughing out blood could make them realize he was sick.
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Godswill wrote from Uyo, Nigeria.
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