My upbringing, the culture and tradition I was groomed with, and the total lifestyle of the hood I was bred in have had a large impact on my adult life. Some of the traits I still exhibit today may appear negative to a lot of people around me, and it's funny when I get tackled on such grounds. Aside from that, I love how I was trained and the environment that shaped my life.
In the current city where I’m living, when I first relocated, I stayed with a family before getting my own apartment. This family was, and still is, the opposite of the kind of lifestyle I was brought up with—and that’s especially in regard to fear. What do I mean?
In the village where I was raised, one of the things we enjoyed was peace, and there was never any issue of running helter-skelter due to war, theft, or anything of that sort. Of course, you can’t completely take away things like theft and troubling issues in the land. These existed, but on a very limited scale. This made us live a very free life. Sometimes we would stay outside till 2 a.m. before going inside to sleep; most times we slept without locking doors and windows. We would go anywhere at midnight without fear—even going to the bush, close to the cemetery, to hunt for animals without fear. We would see a snake, and instead of running away, we would chase it—because we were used to the farm and those wild animals. Mehn, there was nothing to be scared of.
So, when I relocated, I got queried many times for sleeping at night without locking my windows. I would hear things like, "Kingsley, this is not a village oooh! Things are different here." Honestly, I knew that cities are full of mishaps, but considering a situation where I could get harmed while sleeping in my house—that never crossed my mind. 😅
You need to see how this family was always locking the door every now and then, even during the daytime, and I couldn’t just believe my eyes. Well, there was no other point—it was obvious they were just too scared of harm coming to them.
I remember a particular time we went to work and closed very late at night around 1:00 a.m. We were to return to our city that night with loads of our equipment. The road we were to pass through was a bushy one, and when I was thinking we were going to continue our journey, my boss said we were going to lodge in a hotel and continue the journey the next day. I was very mad—why were they so scared like that? Lol.
Meanwhile, I insisted and persistently pressured them for us to continue our journey that night, but they refused because they were scared. That night, I was angered to my bone because I had a visitor I had promised I would be back home that night.
Well, this lifestyle is still in me. I don’t easily get scared, and I love it.
Thanks for reading.
This is my entry to Hiveghana prompt
Image source: MetaAi
