Cold Night During The Season Of HeaT At Fulafia

The year 2023 is one I will never forget in a hurry for the rest of my life. It started pretty well, I was healthy, I wasn't lacking much and there were no complications with my results in school so everything looked like I was heading to the promised land but everything changed in the second month that messed the whole year up for me.

February in Nigeria is normally labelled with intense heat and for people living in the northern part of the country, it feels like the sun is only a block away from their residences. As a citizen born and bred in the North I was already accustomed to the heat. However nothing prepared me from the dragon's breath that is Lafia which unfortunately happens to be where I schooled for 5 years. The place is so hot that the first time I got there in 2019, I kept checking the sky to confirm if there was another sun hiding the original one up there.
Flash forward to 2023, the heat was just as fierce as it always was and for students during this period, we were forced to sleep outside due to lack of consistent electricity supply at dusk. My roommate and I fell in the category of students who slept outside during this period, laying our tiny beds right in front of our room whenever we were ready to sleep. On the 16th of February, we did our usual evening routine and by roughly past 9 we both decided to sleep inside the house but would be leaving the doors open to ensure standard ventilation. By past one I woke up to charge my phone as electricity had just been restored but I could not find it anywhere. I quickly alerted my roommate that my phone was missing and he should check if his phone was still with him but as I suspected his phone was missing too.

We both rushed out of the room looking for some kind of clue to the locations of our phones and almost immediately after we came outside, we found out the gate the entire compound was open meaning someone came inside the lodge, saw that our door was open robbed us and left just as easily as he had walked in. Turns out one one of our fellow lodge mates came back late that night and completely forgot to lock the gate before going to sleep. I woke up all our neighbors to try dialing our numbers, mine was not reachable but roommates rang twice before the burglar switched it off. Just as we were about heading back into our room to wallow in our misery, I saw both my sim cards in front of the door meaning the thief even had time to remove them while we were still in fairytopia.

I could not sleep that night, my mind kept drifting back and forth into the realm of endless possibilities constantly asking my self questions surrounding what if. At dawn my roommate stood up to go play football just so he could get his mind off things, he saw both his sim cards carefully placed at a visible spot by the side of the gate. This could only mean two things, the thief returned these sim cards super early that morning so that we would not see him and he was definitely someone we knew. However we had no way of proving my second hypothesis so we just left things the way they were and accepted our fate.
The rest was a complete mess for me, I was phone-less, broke and could barely contribute to school activities that revolved around having access to the Internet however I still persevered.
It took me about 13 months to purchase a new phone after working hard and sacrificing most of my comforts to make my goal achievable. I still can't forget how the whole thing felt, that experience will always be a dark part of history pushing me to always proceed with caution
Thanks