Whenever I was in the office, waiting for patients to come for their blood test, I would read. I bought Polytechnic and University forms. I wrote and I passed them.
In the JAMB, I picked Unizik, Mass Communication. I went there. I missed the cut off mark by 10.
I returned to Lagos. The polytechnic was a scale through, but I didn’t bother to go. It was also for Mass Communication.
Everybody in my place of work talked about my two results. One of them, a man, brother Gbenga, came to have a fatherly talk with me. He told me that I should do everything to further my education. He said I shouldn’t waste my brain.
Then a lady came. Sister Shade. She said I should apply for a change of university, still using my Unizik score. She said her brother would assist me. She didn’t want that score to go to waste.
But everything boils down to money. I had a good friend. His name was Funmi. A mechanic and uneducated. He was the one that brought the idea of how I could raise money.
He said I should print on envelopes, soliciting for educational funds. He bought the envelopes and gave his cousin, an apprentice in a printing firm, to write “Juliana Francis, Educational Appeal Fund.”
Money came in trickles. I got to read English Literature in Unilorin.
It was not rosy in school. Nay, life had never been rosy for me since I was born. But everything that happened to me made me a fighter. Never quitting.
I begged to eat most times. Borrowed friends’ clothes to classes. This is why I can’t understand why some undergraduate ladies embrace prostitution. I have stood at bus stops several times to beg. So, what the heck! It beats prostitution!
I graduated and got my first job with The Sun Newspaper.
The then Sunday Editor, Louis Odion, mandated me to start writing on sex and relationships.
I was serving in Jigawa State when I realised that most people who had relationship troubles walk the narrow path to my door. I talked, they listened. It seemed to help and worked for them.
So when Odion came, I just transferred my preaching to writing.
My rapist saw my picture in The Sun Newspaper one day and couldn’t believe his eyes. He went to my cousin and took my phone number.
He called and introduced himself. I was cold to him. The idiot actually expected me to be happy he called. The nerve!
I almost died of shock when he came to my office, asking for my hand in marriage.
I walked him out.
Now you know why I love my rapist. If he didn’t scorn and scar me, I wouldn’t have bothered with the four walls of the university.
My advice to parents is that they must never give their kids out to anyone. Whether blood sisters, brothers, cousins or grandparents.
Nobody can take care of your kids more than you. When I was living with my eldest sister, I was severally violated by my brother in-law’s people.
I couldn’t tell anyone. My sister was never at home. It was a two room apartment. In the night, my sister and her husband slept in the bedroom with the kids, while I slept in the parlour with any visiting in-law.
I woke up countless times at night to fight fingers burrowing into my little, undefined and untapped virginal.
I woke up one night to discover one trying to push his turgid manhood into me. I pushed him away and couldn’t sleep throughout the night. I was frightened out of my wits.
In the morning, I tried to keep as far away from him possible. He laughed whenever he caught me edging away from him. It was funny to him. He didn’t care the damage he was causing a mere kid.
I saw last him last year and almost attacked him. It was at the burial of my eldest sister.
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