I was a struggling student in a polytechnic, and there was little I could do for the people around me in terms of financial support, however, there’s one thing I offered whenever there was a need to.
I woke up one day and logged in to Facebook to check if I had any message after a long break from there. I am not a Facebook person, I just got the urge to open it on this particular day.
I was welcomed by lots of friend requests that I decided to reply to later, but a particular message from one of the pending friend requests caught my attention.
“Hello, sis”. Oh, wait, “sis? This person must know me”, I said to myself. I sit upright from my bed to type a response, and immediately, I saw the status, “typing”. He probably was waiting for me to come online so he could type the rest of the message, so, I waited after I had responded with “hi, can I know you, please”.
“My name is Solomon, (not the real name), and I’ve been looking all around for you”. ‘Why have you been looking for me?” I asked after I had taken a proper look at his profile and saw nothing familiar.
“I wanted to thank you for the help you rendered when you were in Epe some years ago and wanted to give you an update about my life”, he said.
Honestly, I didn’t remember him until many days later when I thought deeply about the conversation, and that’s because I never knew his name. but, with the description of him, and the situation that led to the conversation we had, I finally remembered.
He was a pretty young man who was going to live a life of comparison and tried to measure up to the standards of his mates in school. He was a high school student whose dream was to be done with school, learn a trade, make money with every means possible, and live large.
His plans looked okay until he mentioned “make money by all means possible”, and that’s because there were rich kids in his school whose parents didn’t know where their kids got the money from. He wanted their life so bad, however, what he didn’t know was that those rich kids were frauds.
They swindled people of their hard-earned money, and even steal from unsuspecting traders in the community. This wasn’t clear until later when the police raided the community and arrested them for robbery on a faithful night.
I didn’t know what these kids do for money at the time I talked to this guy like he was my brother. I didn’t have money to give to him to learn a trade or even fund the lifestyle he so badly wanted to live, but I had the perfect words to convince him to live a life better than the people he looked up to in his school.
I remember asking him if he knew where those kids got their money from, and he said, “no” but he was going to move close to them so he could learn.
I told him learning from them is a good one but be “sure not to get stuck in a life you can’t opt out of later.” His mum was an old woman. So, I told him to remember his mum’s struggles and just try to replan his life.
“Be done with high school, learn a trade, work for some time, try to gain admission into a public university, provide services to your fellow students, and try to graduate with a good grade, and you’ll see your high school mates jealous of you by the time you’re done.” That was all I said to him.
So, when he messaged me that year, he was going to tell me that he learnt barbing, and was a student at a university already.
Money is not the only way to help people after all. Sometimes, helping people find their way is a huge favour you can render if you have the means to.
Images are mine.