Civil unrest in town.

The civil unrest in the town was running into the third day and businesses were grounded as a result. People could not travel for any reason. It wasn't safe to do so. There was palpable tension everywhere.

The time was already 9 am and we didn't have foodstuff in our room to prepare for breakfast. I tapped Jude to wake up from sleep so that we could find a way around getting breakfast. We individually checked our wallets and we got about 2000 Naira cash remaining with us.

"Let's go to the grocery store immediately to see if we can get something." I told Jude.

As we left our room, located on the third floor, on reaching the balcony, I saw a mammoth crowd defying orderliness to buy the remaining stock in the store. I almost lost faith at this stage but since nothing was in the room to fall back to, we had to go to shop and see if there was any hope.

Trekking through the ground floor corridor, we were meeting some people that were returning from the store grumbling that they couldn't get anything to buy. The stock has been exhausted. My legs became heavy but I managed to go and see the situation myself. We got to the shop and found it empty. Other shops in the mini market ran out of stock a day before. The situation became critical.

About 70% of the population were with their money but looking for what to eat. Luckily for us, it was during mango season and there were some mango trees some hundreds of meters away from the hostel buildings. We decided to go and pluck mangoes to quench our hunger. It was like an adventure embarked upon by hundreds of people. The mango plantation was invaded in the efforts of students to get what to eat.

A few minutes after getting to the mango plantation, sounds of gunshots became audible from close range. We ran helter -skelter back to our hostel. For the fact that nothing was attractive in the room, we decided to gather outside the hostel with hundreds of other students.

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The few generous ones that had some foodstuffs in their room brought them out for us to cook and eat.

The government had promised to supply us some emergency relief items but the third day was winding up without anything of such. We managed to take something out of the benevolence of other generous students before entering our rooms to sleep.

Jude and I barely entered our rooms when we heard of the screaming of our colleagues from the girls hostel section. We rushed out and met all the girls outside the hostel.

One of the girls claimed to have seen a strange object that resembled explosives in the toilets section of their block. Immediately she raised the alarm, everyone in the said block and the adjoining ones rushed out of their rooms.

The students' leader put a call across to the police and an anti bomb squad was deployed to the hostel immediately. The squad came and evacuated the object. Then the situation became more scary.

We were outside till 11 pm before some of the boys decided to inspect all the five blocks in the hostel. A block had about 115 rooms housing an average of three students per room.

After ascertaining that the hostel was safe for us to go and sleep, we encouraged everyone to enter their rooms and sleep. Whereas the boys were ready to enter their rooms, the girls refused. They said they'd preferred to sleep in the open space than to enter their blocks where an explosive had just been evacuated.
We couldn't leave them to sleep outside while we went inside to sleep.

We decided to sleep in the same block. Some of the girls were skeptical in accepting such an arrangement. They were scared of their safety if they slept randomly among boys. To allay their fears, we decided to keep some rooms exclusively out for the girls while the traditional occupants of such rooms joined the boys in the other rooms to sleep.

It was that midnight that a supply of bread and tea arrived from the government. Few of us volunteered to prepare the tea for those that were seriously hungry at that point, especially the girls. That was how we navigated through that night in a spirit of camaraderie.

It was a night that was longer than tens of days. The following day, normalcy began to return to the town and the supply from the government to the hostel increased. Soldiers were deployed to take over the flashpoints in town and the traders in the hostel market began to resume their trades gradually.

It was an experience no one would wish to witness again but our level of camaraderie helped us to scale the huddle.