It’s all familiar, the rush of legs around the quad – the first day of school. Students of various shapes and sizes, moulds and designs, styles and gait, traipsing all over what a few weeks ago was just a quiet neighbourhood of a few teachers and construction workers. Now, the peace is over and the devil of rote is back. The pandora’s box has been open and won’t be restrained anymore until sometime in the dead of winter. Yes, here we go again.
For me, my last Fall semester in this haunted place as a student, it will soon get pretty busy and, eventually, quiet. Unfortunately, as I have experienced very many times over, approaching the end doesn’t always bring as much of a thrill as exaggerated expectations usually hopes it would. Maybe the thrill is more in the process than in the end itself.
I noticed that I’ve talked too much about the game population of the village where I now live, but I never showed any visual confirmation of my observations. The reason is, the first time I saw one of these deers at Cougar Village, I was in a car, and the animals were too far away. In any case, they could have easily escaped back into the bush if we had tried to park close to them. The second time I saw another herd, I had lost my camera and my Nokia phone would not zoom close to them before they again wandered off. While riding back from campus yesterday, I came across these ones grazing by the roadside. Luckily they were close enough, and were tolerant enough to humour me for the little time I spent posing to shoot them. With my phone camera, of course, silly! Enjoy the photos.
A few other interesting things have happened to me since last week. My classmate in the Linguistics Master’s class had gone into Wikipedia over the weekend to learn more about Nigeria, and I was pleasantly surprised and genuinely impressed with how much he had known by the time we met on Monday to discuss the class assignment. Guess his name, by the way: It’s Chris! I always seem to be blessed with one new Chris everywhere I go, and they always turn out to be really intriguing characters. For every Chris Brown, there always seem to be a Chris Rock somewhere to compensate. Glory be! And a few days ago, when this new Chris finally became my Facebook friend, I found that his recent status update had been “Chris now knows that English is the national language of Nigeria.” God bless the Fulbright program!
The academic session here on campus is switching into full gear, and I’ve already submitted one assignment for the Linguistics class. One of my first observations in this postgraduate class, beside the fact that many of my classmates were not at all familar with phonetics was that the syllabus in the masters class was full of the topics I already covered since my first year in the University of Ibadan. This must be why students coming from Africa always seem to perform better at Masters level in foreign universities. It also throws light on the wrong assumption that all of our academic establishments back home are substandard, and that the standard of education has fallen to an abyssmal low. Yes we do have a lack as regards infrastructure, but what we lack in up-to-date state-of-the-art facilities, we often compensate for with hardwork and doggedness.
