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“He is such a lackadaisical man and he should be arrested for his foolish procrastinations,” my dad had said with his loud voice. “And he is not following these children for the stupid journey he put them on. What if something happens on the road? How can a so-called teacher be so senseless?” my mum added. I managed to convince them that it wasn’t such a bad idea and we really had no alternative because all our efforts, both financial and mental could not go to waste because of one man’s errors. After series of prayers and drowning the roads I’ll be taking with blood, they let me go. I was on my way from Kwara State, Kaiama precisely, with Bunmi and Rejoice. We were going back to Osogbo where we all resided after a week of tumultuous torture at the UTME centre in Kaiama. We had stayed an extra two days at the centre because there were no buses to take us home, and when they finally arrived, they came towards night time. We couldn’t risk boarding those buses especially after hearing horrible stories of girls who had been viciously raped and boys whose dicks were cut off for money ritual on their way from the centre. On this day, however, we had decided that we were not going to stay one more day at the secondary school we used for the exams. We had not had our baths for a week and we hadn’t eaten good food too; the water in Kaiama was so bad and we couldn’t bear the thought of eating food cooked with that water, so we opted for snacks throughout the week. The bus came early around 3pm and gladly, we boarded, thinking we would leave so soon. But other UTME candidates were still writing their exams,and the driver couldn’t leave with just the three of us. Sadly, we waited and watched time go by leaving us in that empty bus. Other “Jambites” soon started trooping out by 6pm and by 7:30, the bus was full. The journey ahead loomed with danger. We were all “young adults” so we masked our fears with humorous conversations and chipped in some common songs here and there. I, Bunmi and Rejoice knew we were doing something so dangerous but there was nothing we could do about it. Everyone put on a façade of maturity and our fears were masked with smiles on our faces. Soon, phones started ringing, with parents worried about their teenage children who had still not gotten home by 10pm. One boy, who had played the mature role so well, was engaged in a heat-filled conversation with his mum,and soon, we saw him fidget with his phone to hand it over to the driver. The driver, accustomed to worried mothers calmly assured his mother that he was fine and he would get to Osogbo early the next day. Fear filled our hearts but we still found it easy to laugh about the crowd of people gathered around a small television set,and how uncivilized the whole place was. We talked about how we had gone for so long a distance without one soul in sight. We laughed and sang throughout the midnight journey. Soon, our voices grew tired and you could hear sleep stealing in. Suddenly, we saw a flashlight in the far distance and our conversations seized abruptly. Could these be the evildoers we had heard so much about? We were unable to make any meaningful conversation until our bus got to the source of the flashlight. We prayed fervently to be saved the horrors of nighttime. Getting there, we found out that they were only watchmen assigned to protect the roads from robbers and other forms of danger. Relief flooded our hearts and some soon drifted off to sleep. The driver stopped moving, and when someone asked why, he told us we were at the park,and it was going to be impossible for us to board our next bus by 3am. He advised us to sleep till it was about 6am where the other buses were sure to have arrived, and we did. We slept in the car park till the next morning.