WHEN HARD WORK MEETS LUCK

It was after the sets the lecturer made the announcement I dreaded so much, He told us to have it at the back of our mind that we must buy his textbooks before the upcoming exams in two weeks else he would not allow us write his exam. For a 5 credit unit course I knew I needed to find a way out, but then this would be course number eight piling up for me to pay up. There were also school dues that I needed to pay for and at that point my current bills were piling up to 52,000 naira. Every single textbook was 5,000 and I had only gotten two out of 12. Doing a Job that paid me 10,000 naira a month with no financial sponsor. My feeding, accommodation and all the bills a student needed to sort out would have to be paid by me. I barely got through them in the previous semester, and in the new semester things were becoming worse. Finding a way to survive through it all was my utmost priority, but no matter how hard I tried, I always hit a brick wall.

In a bid to make some extra cash, I would borrow laptops from friends to get design jobs to do and charge as low as 2,000 or 3,000 and then give the person who borrowed me 1,000 naira. But most of that money went into feeding as I was often always too exhausted after the day's work. In a week I ended up with 5,000 naira being able to afford one text book. Left with one week to the exam, I came to school thinking of something I could do differently. I had made plans to beg all the lecturers to pardon me as I will be trying to buy one text book every week, but deep down, I knew it would be a dead end. But then I noticed a lot of students were near the notice board, reaching there I was met with the best news I could never have imagined would happen. Exams had been postponed by a month, and that wasn’t even the best news. The school authorities had mandated every lecturer to give term papers to all departments and immediately I saw that, I saw a goldmine.

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Seeing a lot of students saddened by the thought of extra bills alongside the postponement of the exams, I was happy because I had found a business that was going to make me a lot of money, more than enough to buy my textbooks and pay for my next semester school fees. All classes had also been canceled and reaching my department building to get my term paper topic, I saw a lot of students coming to me for their term paper. I charged 2,500 naira to help them with their research work, and added the money for printing the number of pages allocated to the assignment. For every assignment I was doing I was earning at least 3000 naira knowing I had a place where I could print for half the price normal cybercafe charges and I could pay for all other expenses like data and laptop rent. I decided to stay in school for the entire day, as more and more students came to me and by the end of the day I had a total of 54 assignments to do.

Most of the lecturers by the way refused to give me my term paper topic because I had not gotten their textbooks, but by the end of the day I was already calculating a profit of 150,000 naira plus extras. I got all my topics before the lectures closed for the day knowing I might not see them again till submission time. After paying and getting my topics I went ahead to buy 10,000 naira worth of data for my research and before going up went to borrow a laptop from my friend. But on reaching his house, I noticed there was a printer there, so I asked if he was using it for the next week. He allowed me to borrow it with the condition that I just refill the ink and use my own A4 papers. At the end of the day I had a printer, laptop, and only spent half the money I would have been charged by the cyber cafe who were going to print for half the price normal cybercafes charge. More jobs came after that, and it was enough to get me my school fees and textbooks for the next semester.

THIS IS MY ENTRY INTO THE INKWELL CREATIVE NONFICTION PROMPT #136