IT WAS CRAZY AS HELL

Driving is fun when you know where you are going, but when you don't know, especially finding yourself in a country like Nigeria where the rate of insecurity is on the high side. Getting lost on the highway is as fearful as death itself because you do not know the evil lagging behind the woods. In my lifetime I have been privileged to travel a reasonable amount of time, and I've also experienced some mind-blowing unforgettable experiences. The one that came to mind immediately after I saw this prompt was what I shared in 2022 after escaping with my life. I'm not sure that a lot of people would remember so I will share it here again. Although it isn't the only bad driving experience I have encountered, I've encountered quite a number of bad traveling experiences both on air, land, and water.

Image by Drazen Zigic on Freepik

Imagine singing this Nigerian song “Mami water power, powerless power” in the middle of a river when you can't swim. Nigerians will be fully able to relate to this, but for the sake of non-Nigerians reading, it's simply saying water spirits are powerless in the middle of an Ocean. Like what are you expecting to happen 😂. The day that event happened, nobody agreed to say that Mami-water power was powerless in the song, but everyone agreed Jesus' power was super 😂. We were just looking at the guy raising the song like “What’s your plan for us this guy* 😂. Anyway, that's by the way, like I said I've experienced a lot of not-so-pleasant journeys which were more like adventures, but I'm happy to have survived them all.

Is it when my dad carried the entire family on a 12-hour trip from Warri to Ogun state because the people he was owing were after his life, or when I was in a plane that suddenly stopped in mid-air and was going down with full force (I do not still know what caused it) but I and everyone onboard became so scared that we almost peed on ourselves. If I should talk about all these experiences I might just have to write a book. So instead I will talk about how I spent two days in the middle of a thick forest because the driver was trying to play smart. So without further ado, this is my story.

In 2022, I decided to go for my church's yearly camp at the headquarters, it was meant to be a simple 9-hour journey from Port Harcourt to Lagos (Ibadun Express Way). It wasn't my first time going for such Journeys, so I was already prepared for the rough roads along the way. What I was not prepared for was the madness that happened throughout the journey. My church had hired a 30-seater bus to take us to and fro, but the accountant in a bid to get something out of it for himself, got a public vehicle and didn't pay the driver the complete money that was agreed. This made the driver impatient and did the unspeakable on our return.

The madness started when we were going, there were a lot of quarrels and fights between the members caused by different reasons, especially because the bus was not what we expected. It was an old bus with a lot of faults. The bus stopped more than five times when we were going and it was very slow as well. We ended up spending almost 15 hours on a 9-hour journey. Coming back was worse. I was busy settling the fight from the beginning of the Journey until we got to the middle of nowhere. There were fights between passengers, then it escalated between the driver and the passengers after we complained that we were more than the numbers that came in. Imagine some of us standing all through the journey.

Image by Drazen Zigic on Freepik
This was how the girl sitting by my side turned me to her pillow when I was looking out for my life

Someone broke his laptop in the fight and some got injured based on the intensity. What the driver did was that he carried other passengers because he wanted to get money for himself seeing he spent most of it fixing the bus when we were coming. We had not even gone a quarter of the journey when all these things happened coupled with the fact that the bus started developing more issues which made the passengers have enough room to fight. The climax of the problem was when we got halfway, the route the driver took was different from what we all knew, so we pressured him to talk before he admitted that indeed he was taking a different route because the passengers he carried were going to another location.

That was a period when one of the Biafra states was having a seat at home lock down, so the majority protested that the driver should not pass that route and look for a way to sort out those passengers he carried. At that time it was already about past 8 pm and we were also thinking of a place to lounge so we didn't travel in the middle of the night seeing how slow the bus was. The bus driver however was still trying to play smart when we called the accountant to tell him our predicament as he's the one in charge of our welfare. He lied that the pastorate said we should sleep in one of the branch churches close by giving us directions, and the bus driver decided to take advantage of it knowing that nobody knows that environment.

He planned to manova his way to that state because he heard there was a one-hour shortcut from where we were to that state. However, he did not know the road fully well and that was how we ended up in the middle of the forest at 11:pm. In a bid to get out of the forest, we entered deeper until we reached the camp of Fulani herdsmen (a notorious terrorist group). Thankfully before we got to where they were, we met someone from that environment who told us where we were and the trouble we were in. He also told the driver what and what not to say when we reached where the herdsmen were while the rest of us sat quietly in the bus praying for our lives.

The once quarrelsome bus became as quiet as a graveyard, we couldn't turn back because we were already in their camp, and according to the man, they were watching us already, turning back would be as though we came to spy on them so the only thing we could do was move forward and pray we meet the herdsmen in good fate. Getting to where they were, we did exactly as we were instructed except for a woman who had been eating all kinds of things throughout the journey and was now stooling in the vehicle. We had to stop every 30 minutes along the way, the herdsmen instructed us to follow them on their night patrol which we did throughout the night, and when it was nearly dawn, they showed us a 30-minute road that drew us closer to home.

We found ourselves in Delta state from where we were in Edo state Nigeria. We came out from a forest very close to Bayelsa State. The driver had to put his passengers in another vehicle at 6:30 am the next morning while we continued in that slow bus for the next five hours. The last five hours of the journey were peaceful though because we were all too exhausted for a fight or quarrel. We stayed throughout the night with our eyes open and just wanted to sleep for a while. Getting to church around noon, the accountant was lucky he wasn't in church, but some of the passengers decided they would wait for him to give him a piece of their mind as they wanted to also make sure he paid the driver in full to cover up for his losses. I didn't wait to see the outcome, I just went home that day to thank God for saving my life from that horrible adventure.

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 99 EPISODE 3