“Wake that girl sleeping and tell her to stand up”.
On this episode of my camp series, you're going to find out how I went from 5/10- 0 on my battle with improper sleep schedules.
Before camp, I used to always want to nap and my nap usually had to last more than 30 minutes, 1 minute less than 30 minutes will automatically give me a headache. You're like this too, yeah? Shockingly, since I and my fellow Nigerian youths unknowingly registered for military short service (in disguise), my life changed. I don't know if it has actually changed completely because I've not had the time to take naps since I got out but I really hope I am alright, I need to check on my system to know if she's doing okay.
I got to camp at 1:00am on Monday morning, we spent a lot of time on the road to Koko from Niger State and spent more than 3 hours at Koko waiting for passengers to go to Dakingari, Kebbi State. At this point, every bone in my body was cramped, every joint shaky, and every muscle tired. I was new at this place so I couldn't just decide on my own to get another car to take me directly to camp. We got registered, got bed spaces and got settled in at about 2:00am. By some magic, I saw myself awake at 4:30am that same morning. How? I went through that day like a zombie, I didn't even care how I was looking because I didn't know anybody I'd have liked to impress there. After eating a full plate of rice, moi-moi and fried meat on this first day, I went to get fully registered. I was wearing my bathroom slippers on my fine green dress I'd brought for Sunday. I'd calculated 2 Sundays on camp so I packed accordingly, I miscalculated though, I had too much hopes that I'll begin wearing my white on white from the first day I stepped into camp, at least that was what I'd gathered from all the NYSC gist.
“Wake that girl sleeping and tell her to stand up”. I pride myself as someone who has a lot of self control. I do not sleep during mass, I do not sleep during public functions and I definitely wasn't going to be caught sleeping during SAED lectures, or so I thought. Anyways, I wasn't the girl our SAED teacher was asking someone to wake but I'd also been dozing. All those videos of people sleeping comfortably during SAED classes were definitely not from my camp because soldiers were always everywhere looking for phones to seize temporarily and people to punish. I escaped everytime because I was always putting on my shades but they eventually told us to stop wearing shades. Wicked people!
On this very gloomy day, I was already stressed from standing and sitting under the plenty sun outside and I was lying on my bed trying to remedy a delivery issue with my boots business. Things were turning sour by the minute and my mood was dropping and dropping. After I'd stressed for a lot of minutes, I checked and saw that the time was about 40 minutes until we had to go for the next activity, so I willed my brain to take a rest. I planned to wake up 10 minutes to the time so that it'll be enough to freshen up and not be late. ‘A few hours later’, I opened my eyes panicking, but when I looked around I saw people still relaxed on their beds. I checked and I'd only slept for 15 minutes. 15 minutes? How did it now seem like 4 hours? I think that was the first time I was waking up feeling satisfied with sleep. I tried to sleep again and saw myself awake after sleeping for yet another 15 minutes. Blood of Jesus o, I don't want to be a soldier 😠I just stood up and freshened up.
Another time after I'd joined the OBS crew, others were going for sports and I was honestly just looking for space to sleep for just a few minutes. I found a good enough spot and slept. My neck and waist weren't in the best positions but mahn had I slept that soundly in awhile.
I didn't gist my mum this part of camp because I didn't want to be judged for all my years of claiming headaches because of insufficient sleep.
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