At two am on Sunday November 1st, time changed in America and everyone shifted their clocks an hour backwards, to deal with the late daylight that has 7ams looking like 6ams. Since about a week and half, I’d been noticing the fact that the day still looked very dark by 7am, and it always stayed dark until about half an hour later, so it was much of a relief to finally adjust with everybody else, and be able to get one more hour of sleep. For a change, I was also able to use the daylight saving switch button on my Nokia phone. Up until now, the function never meant anything to me other than “another American thing”. In Nigeria, we never had to change our clocks during particular seasons even though this same changes occur twice a year when the day gets shorter and the night gets longer. We didn’t change our clocks. We just adjusted ourselves to it. The changing the time part of the ritual here – I guess – is to make it “official” and generally uniform. It would be weird to get out at seven o’clock in the morning and never be able to find one’s way around because it’s still dark. But I can’t stop wondering: does Daylight Savings apply to the people of Alaska, the land of the midnight sun as well?
By the way, my body is not the only one with problems adjusting to the new time. The last time I checked, the clock on this blog has also refused to comply. It seemed to have a mind of its own, and when it’s 4.03am here (after the DST adjustment) as it is while I type this post, the blog time says it’s 3.03am. I wonder now what the blog time is saving its own one hour for.
It is a season of new things in America today. As soon as the Halloween celebrations ended, the Christmas seasons started. Yes, I was surprised to learn it too, but in America today, the Christmas season doesn’t wait until December. For a long time, it usually started after Thanksgiving in November, but in recent years, people don’t wait that long anymore. There are already some Christmas-themed commercials on television right now, and a few houses are already beginning to light up in the seasonal lights. Yesterday, I saw a news story on television of about sixty Santa Clauses “launched” at a mall in Illinois, showing that it’s never too early for the great seasonal gift bearer to descend from the north pole. If there’s any consolation in this early showing, for me it is in the chance to take some more nice pictures. The more the merrier.
And here are some new things to look forward to before the end of the year: Thanksgiving, with its attendant turkey dinner; Kwanzaa, an African-American family spiritual festival/holiday that takes place for seven days at the end of the year; and of course Christmas, and the countdown to the year’s end. I can’t believe that 2009 is already less than sixty days away.
Monday 2nd November: 
Exactly one year ago today, I had taken a much-needed trip to my old secondary school in Ibadan with a friend from Germany, and received, along with a certain exhilaration of returning to the compound after eleven years, a baptism of heartbreak at the level of the school’s undeserved decrepitude. The desks were bad and disfigured. The structures were falling apart and the school looked like it could use if just a little management. Going back down memory lane, I realized that it seemed to have always been that bad, but schooling there, we cared more about dealing with our academics and making good grades, than caring about how nice the structures looked, or how less than perfect they were compared to the other schools we knew. Thinking about it now, I also realize that we were not that much different from many of the state-run high schools all around the state and the country both in management, educational standard and aesthetics. There is something inherently slack about the way public schools are run in Nigeria. Education is free but not qualitative. It is definitely not worth the long term traumatic and demeaning effect of a poorly gained education. We will never be able to successfully measure how much of the bad management of structures and academic system from such schools have contributed to the continued slide of Nigeria on the list of civilized places in the world – if it was ever on the list in the first place.
Now, this is usually the first question that comes to my mind when I look at the structures of public schools in Nigeria today. I mean physical structures now, and not because it’s more important than curriculum or the total academic system, but because aesthetics is the first condition of sane, healthy learning. The question is: with the enormity of Nigeria’s billion dollar incomes from oil every year, why does education have to be underfunded? I can never get my head around this. As at today, the educational system is in a shambles. And from what I know, it has not always been like this. The people at the leadership positions went through a very organised system that catered for their educational, emotional, physical and even spiritual needs. They got scholarships. They travelled wide, and many of them studied abroad on the bill of the government which at the time was not even this rich. The case seems now like that of the selfish man who destroys a bridge as soon as he gets across it, so as to prevent others. In the universities today, research is almost non-existent, due to underfunding. Most of the students in the department of computer science either don’t have personal computers, or can’t use it within the campus because the University authorities believe that they overload the electricity supply. I couldn’t use a computer in my university for a long time because of this ridiculous argument. The country of Kenya is not half as rich as Nigeria, yet it seems to have a better attitude to education than Nigeria does. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The more I think about it, the angrier I get, so I think I’ll stop here.
During my secondary school days, we always had to bring our own desks from home – made by whichever carpenters our parents chose. The school would not provide the desks. And for security, we also had to bring chains and locks to keep the desks and chairs fastened together so that they don’t get stolen, as they always inevitably did, sometimes even with the chains on them. I had a particularly peculiar misfortune of having always to go around the school looking for my chair or desk at the begining of every week. Someone was bound to have taken them for a ride out of our classrooms because they didn’t have doors. Some times, the search takes me all around the school, and I can’t count how many classes I missed because I was busy so early in the morning trying to locate my desk. I started writing my name on them, but one day, I discovered that writing my name with paint didn’t help at all. In fact, it made matters worse because the recurrent thief also happened to share my name and surname, as I discovered.