GHETTO TEACHER

After writing on the board for a couple of minutes,I turned around and discovered that my phone had mysteriously disappeared from the table were I had placed it.

It was like magic....🧐

I was confused and shocked at the audacity of the thief.I stared at my students and about eighty cold eyes stared back at me as if daring me,a girl at the front roll was trying to stifle a giggle..

All efforts by me to retrieve my phone proved abortive and I had to elicit the help of the older teachers who tried to put my fears to rest.The surprising thing was the sudden emergence of my phone on the same table some hours before the close of school.

Months later, after I had established some kind of relationship with my students, I was told by one of them,

"Ex ma,you get luck wella, your phone don reach Westminster

na to sell am remain"

Looking at the distance from the school to Westminster,a popular phone market in olodi Apapa, I wondered how they managed to take it out of school and returned it without being noticed..

The incidence I just mentioned happened before I got to know them better but believe me, volunteering as a teacher at Tolu Complex was one experience I would never forget in a hurry.It opened my eyes to the good,bad and ugly of ghetto life.My students were boys and girls from middle to low income homes,drawn from the heart of Ajegunle. My job gradually transitioned from teaching to counselling and with each contact I had with students, it was obvious that growing up in here had done something to their minds.It had toughen them to face challenges and the harsh reality of life and for others,it had broken them...

Most of them had suddenly become adults,caring not only for themselves but for their entire family.They juggle side hustles and apprenticeship with their academics,they can be in class physically but their minds are everywhere too. Everyday is a battle for survival and staying in school no longer becomes a luxury but a means of escape.They battle negative peer pressure, parental negligence, poverty, drug abuse,broken homes, rape, cultism and teen pregnancy.

But there is no time/chance to heal from it.They shove it aside and keep moving. Aside from the cult clashes that disrupt learning from time to time, a typical day at the school complex is interesting.

But Irrespective of all these hindrances and constraint,many of them still excel academically and have gone ahead to become great men and women in their chosen professions and skills.Atimes, when my thought finds it way back to Tolu school complex, the words of Talib Kweli comes to mind:

"A flower that grows in the ghetto know more about survival

than the one from fresh meadows".