VISA, TO A CHOICE DESTINATION!

Isn't it overrated, that the people we unreservedly pour our sympathies on are the crowds queuing and struggling to get that 'paper pass' to 'outside country'? The ones who actually were buoyant enough to

afford a plane or bus ticket to that city that's lit and beautiful at night? I hope I'm not assuming.

In various spheres of life, various levels of existence, various hubs of activities, physical or virtual; your existence and consequently, recognition must need be validated. Would you like to know about the many other visas you've so flagrantly neglected?

All the days of our struggle are evolving, they definitely haven't 'come-to-pass'. We have lived in the lowest realms and collided with the rockiest surfaces. How we survived, and how we're surviving, remains largely a miracle. But our stories, when they're told, would unravel many mysteries and you would only then realise that, some miracles do actually come through hardwork!

In a bid to acquire a visa to a choice destination...!

You remember those times when all we had were just our android phones, from our benevolent parents and sponsors, and lifeless sim cards stuck somewhere behind them? Remember when all we had to our names were just the N100 recharge cards we could afford a few times a week, to make those desperate calls home or keep abreast with the bustlings of academic life? Remember when the thought of having a mobile data, was just the charity 10mb donated by MTN, which used to last for a week and subsequently became a child that died at midnight? Do you remember?

Do you also remember when we had to write project, assignments, seminar papers, term papers and we had to face the unintelligent mass of typists, who had only their swiftness on the keyboard as the feather to their caps and lacked every other sense of 'deductiveness' in words and sentence constructions? Do you remember? Or even how we had to helplessly stare at our 'hand-me-down' laptops, which neither had a sustainable battery life nor the internet connectivity to make our research dreams come true? Do you remember how we had assignments to submit, to do, to make findings on, yet we neither had the textbooks nor the means of Internet accessibility to get these things done? Do you remember?

I'm reminded so much of the fate of a little child, who drags on home, slowly, plucking the spear grass that could slash his thumb, and unassumingly, non-shamefacedly, makes his way through the streets, not even realising the sympathetic look from bystanders. Especially when asked why not in school and he innocently says "They 'say' I should go and bring my school fees!" I'm sorely reminded, just like that little child, who should be sitting in a noisy class, full of kids his age, contributing to the noise and shouting with pride, all the unbelievably simple things they'd learnt to the hearing of their teachers; I too, should be, where I am not, right now.

A step further, a little walk into the future; do you remember sitting at home, for days on end, and having your phone as your only companion? You're even worse hit, when you cannot afford a N100 recharge card, to afford all those ridiculously low megabytes, dished out by our very exploitative telecommunications networks, and you have no job, no source of income; you crawl around the house, repeating house chores. Thank God you had a home to live in! At a time when everyone with an access to a reasonable audience, or even no audience at all, was screaming 'Entrepreneurship and self-employment!"? Do you remember feeling frustrated at the insensitivity, and the level of inconsideration, with which those vocal fellows dished out their dictums? Do you remember not being able to boast of even a N500 bill and having so many award-winning ideas swarming in your head, like the termites at rainy season? Ideas with no funds to execute them! Do you remember?

Do you remember having to dress so shabbily, passing by a store and looking longingly at things you would have loved to wear, if, you could afford them? Do you remember living below your comfort level, having to starve, to trek, to save every penny you laid hands on, to gauge your food supplies with the caution and expertise of an economist? Do you remember feeling ashamed, each time you were about to open your mouth to say you couldn't afford something, and realised you had already said that a countless times?

Do you now know what's worse; That in a social media age, where everything you need to know and use is safely locked behind a mobile data plan, a Wi-Fi network and a good android phone or system, you're kept firmly at the other side of the door because you can't afford access to the right combination of gadgets and internet?

It's frustrating, to be denied a visa to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, the wider Internet through search engines, some of us live and thrive on our activities there! Without these, our businesses might die and our ideas may fade! We'll not be able to keep memories and our legacies would be written nowhere. It means a lot to some of us.

I think it's highly overrated that visas are only associated with prestigious embassies! What about us, the common masses? What about all the things we need to have, be, do, survive, and we don't have them because we can't afford them? What about our everyday struggles to make our lives and those of the people we care about, better, and yet we never have even close to sufficient, to do that? What about having to starve, or trek for long distances, or get disgraced out of exam halls, or the irritating robotic voice screaming to the world your insufficient call credit balance, or the ATM impatiently asking if you'd like to perform another transaction because you had insufficient funds, (credit to your bank who debited without notifying you)? What about all that?

There are 365 days in most years, than are not. And in each of those 24 hours we have to patiently go through, we aspire righteously to our choice versions of existence, choice versions of life, choice destinations (in the various spheres of Earth and cloud activities), yet, we are mostly denied a taste, even a glimpse of it! Just because we had no visa, how could we, when we couldn't afford them?!

Just so you know, we worked so hard, but we couldn't get them. Most of them.

We haven't given up hope. Our visas would be ours. In due course. Surely.

~06/08/2017
~06:40hrs
~Just writing...

#Kenebrity©2017