Facing The Giants

I wake up from a slight slumber (because I wouldn’t dare call it sleep), I twist and turn on the mattress  and stretch through its entire breadth just because my roommate with whom I share the mattress (pending the time I’d get angry enough to buy my own) isn’t around. I rumble through the junk at the head of the bed looking for my electro-luminescent 15 Dollar G-Shock wristwatch because it was dark and there was no power; and just as I was about to curse PHCN (though I still prefer to call them NEPA) for making me go through the stress, the light came on and I smiled.

I picked my watch, saw that the time was 3:23am and I start to wonder why I almost always never get to sleep when I’m in the North. Ever since November 2011when I travelled up here for my National Youth Service Corps orientation, I wake up almost every half hour during the night.

I sit up in my bed, pull my cover cloth up to my chin and I push the power button on my laptop (which has incidentally being my closest companion since the 4^th of January). As I wanted to resume my game (which I had been playing before the battery went flat), it occurred to me to just write something; so I closed the game and started my word processor application. Just as the application completed its loading, the reason for my Northern experience of fitful and near non-existent sleep at night hit me like a punch.

FEAR!!! And even as I write this, I become more strongly convinced that it is the chief reason for my sleepless nights. Along with my conviction came the desire to face the many fears that have stolen my sleep. Although some of them no longer matter, yet, they still form part of the hydra headed monster troubling me; like the fear of being posted to a village without electricity or water, or of being posted to that local government rumoured to be the home of snakes of all kinds. There is also the infective or epidemic fear of Boko Haram especially with Gombe State being right in the middle of the troubled North Eastern region of Nigeria.

Most of my other fears I won’t list because of my privacy but I’m trying to see if identifying them and putting them in black and white (or in this case, on my computer and subsequently the internet) would help me face them. I don’t know how true and scientifically proven the saying “facing your fears is the best way to overcome them” is, but I’m willing to try so that I can put in a good shift of rest every night of my stay here.