The wrong way to handle bullies here

One time, I stood up for myself against some bullies, but what followed surprised me. Life would have probably been way better off for me if I had just kept my mouth shut. What I didn't realise was that I actually didn't know how the system worked.

It was my first few months in school. I wondered how I landed in a military school, but that wasn't going to help the situation of things. The matter at hand was about navigating life within those four walls with bullies.

I felt wronged by two seniors on different occasions. Senior A was in SS3, and senior B was in SS2. B was, however, a "repeater," and so he was also mates with those SS3. Perhaps I had been beaten, had my money extorted, or something, but I didn't feel comfortable with whatever each of them did to me and reported to a teacher. In my mind, "I wasn't going to be silenced!" But what followed really silenced me.

In my presence, both seniors were reprimanded. To me, they looked sorry. But no, I didn't get the memo.

In that school, reporting seniors was never a guaranteed successful endeavour. You proceed at your own risk, even if the senior is wrong. Unless, of course, the situation truly is so severe that even the colleagues of the seniors would reckon that it was truly bad. In my case, it wasn't "truly bad" and only a normal thing.

Pablo was what they called Senior A, and he was the house captain of the particular house [or hostel] that I lived in. See how it's all coming together now? And the next morning, as I stepped out in my sharp uniform, he spotted me. "Hey, you pick up that broom and clear the water in the gutter." It was at this point I knew I f*cked up.

I had already done my part of the chore for the morning, so the extra job wasn't supposed to happen. But I didn't understand just why yet. I had "bought a job," as the military here would put it.

When school was over that day and I had eaten at the galley, our dining hall, I returned to the hostel. This time, Senior B spotted me as I entered the hostel. Yes, B was in the same hostel as Pablo, the very hostel I lived in. And B threw a stack of buckets at me from the first floor. "Jajaja," I laughed in Spanish within me.

Water runs in the morning in that school, and the only other place to fetch water was at "Farm," at the end of the school compound. Farm was actually downhill and not the most convenient place to fetch water. There were four hostels, and mine was the second closest, thankfully, but it still wasn't a short distance. And, no, I do not know why it was called "Farm."

As an SS1 student, the only way to conveniently do B's bidding was to gather some juniors of mine to carry each bucket for me to his room. The funny thing was that those juniors would run and hide at the sight of the Kilimanjaro you're carrying. I must have been able to round up a few JSS1s and JSS2s eventually. But that wasn't the end.

That's how it continued for weeks. Pablo and B continually fixated pressure on me. There was no way I could report that, as they were just being "seniors." I could have even gotten into trouble for trying to report being "fixed," which was the term for being made to suffer.

Then I learnt a lesson. You don't report seniors in Nigerian Navy Secondary School. It was already a jungle being a boys' school, so the only way out was usually by bracing whatever comes your way and "chesting it."

There were many more seniors I should have reported as time passed, but I never forgot my lesson. The one time I had to report a senior after learning the lesson, it was very crucial because the senior was even overdoing. That one even turned out to be a coward himself, but it's a story for another day.

Might have been an unusual way to learn about resilience, but that and many other experiences taught me a lot about life that still helps me to this day. My confidence level, for example, totally transformed in that school. Talk about even dealing with bullies that were my mates; it was a different ball game.