That was when the silence inside the bus changed. This was not the silence of sleep or exhaustion, but the kind that arrives when people realise they are no longer near anything familiar. Through the dusty window, I watched darkness spread across the road as though it had been waiting for us.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. My mother’s message lit the screen. Have you passed Abuja?
I did not reply. I did not know how to explain that Abuja already felt like another world, and Bauchi was still ahead of us like a question nobody prepares you for.
The man beside me had stopped smiling hours ago. At the beginning of the journey from Awka, his voice had been loud and confident.
Lawrence, from Anambra… Going to Bauchi…
As though it were a story he had already survived. Now he held his bag tightly on his lap, as if his future might fall out if he loosened his grip.
At the front of the bus, a girl prayed silently. It was not the attention seeking kind, rather she was trying to bottle up her fear so it doesn’t spill.
We soon arrived at the first check point. A red light appeared suddenly and our car tyres screeched to a halt. The dust rose and blocked our sight like when a curtain is pulled across a stage. A hand full of uniformed men moved around the bus peering into the windows and looking at every one of us with suspicion.
One tapped the window beside me. I could not hear his words clearly, only the shape of them. The driver leaned forward.
“Everybody, bring out your IDs!”
Something in his voice tightened my chest. I was no longer in Anambra. Another part of Nigeria was stretching itself into places where familiarity could not travel.
When we moved again, nobody spoke. Even laughter had abandoned us somewhere between Lokoja and uncertainty. Outside the old weathered windows, the land had changed its language. Green happy forests thinned into open emptiness. Vibrant villages became distant flickers of light. As the breeze struck my face, the air felt altered, as though it had learned how to be less familiar.
I remember thinking… How can a country carry one name and still contain so many different worlds? We were going for NYSC. That was what everyone said.
It was a service year. It was our national duty. It was going to be one year of shared identity. But no one explained that sometimes service is not what you give. Sometimes it is what you lose while trying to understand where you belong.
By the time we entered Bauchi State, night had fully settled. It arrived like something already decided.
The driver slowed.
“We are almost there,” someone said from the front. Even though almost there felt like another way of saying you are no longer where you came from. I rested my head against the window. For the first time since leaving Awka, I finally felt it.
Like the version of me, Chinecherem, that my parents knew had been left behind between prayers spoken in Anambra and dust rising in the North.
We arrived at the NYSC camp in Bauchi at dawn. The sun was harsh and waiting for us.
A soldier’s voice tore through the air.
“Corpers, alight quickly!”
Everyone obeyed; no one hesitated or asked questions. Quick movements became the first lesson of survival. As I stepped down, I paused. The bus door shut behind me with a heavy thud.
At that moment, something I was not prepared for dawned on me. The bus that brought me here did not know my name and neither did this place. We were addressed as Prospective Corps Members (PCM). We were not seen as students, graduates or individuals. Just PCM, a category of waiting.
“Corpers, move to registration!” The command split the morning air.
I tightened my bag and stepped forward with the others. Something inside me hesitated, it was a sense of awareness that I was no longer travelling. I had arrived in a place that would begin to redefine me without asking my permission.
On the parade ground, the sun rose too sharply, as though it had a personal interest in our discomfort. We stood erect in our white-on-white, arranged into lines that tried to give confusion a form.
A soldier walked past slowly. His boots pressed into the earth with a certainty that needed no explanation.
He stopped in front of me.
“You. Where you come from?”
“Anambra, sir.”
“And your name?”
“Chinecherem.”
He frowned.
“Chine wetin? Wetin be that one? You sure say na name be that?”
A few people shifted uneasily. It was the discomfort of watching someone being translated wrongly in her own country. No one laughed, the place only grew quieter.
“It means God thinks of me, sir.”
He gave a half-smile that did not indicate understanding, then moved on. That experience shook me, the legitimacy of my identity had been questioned. And it happened without a warning. The white uniform which was supposed to mean order, unity, discipline no longer did so.
Instead, it exposed everything.
I was discomfited at first not that anyone around me said a word but I felt seen in a way I could not control so I took an unconscious step backward.
It was a harmless gesture out of embarrassment that did not go unnoticed.
“Hey, you there!”
The shout came from the far end.
“Run, come here! Why you leave line?”
My body froze. Every eye turned to me.
I walked towards him, heart pounding. “I needed to adjust myself, sir.”
“Na why you break formation be that?”
I opened my mouth, but no answer came.
“Go back to your line,” he said and I did as he instructed.
But I did not return to the line the same. After the registration, I stepped behind one of the hostel blocks and I broke down in tears. I never thought that dignity could be washed away in seconds and that there would be no announcement for its return.
I cried myself to exhaustion. Adebimpe, a girl from Lagos found me there. She was my hostel mate, though we barely spoke.
She was Yoruba, and I was Igbo, and between us lived the quiet distance of people who shared the space that was our NYSC orientation camp but not intimacy.
Still, she saw me differently that day. She sat beside me without asking questions.She spoke after a while.
“My dear… don’t take it to heart. All of us are under fire together..”
I shook my head. “I felt like everybody saw me.”
She looked down. “They saw a moment. Not your whole life…” I nodded. Coming from someone who barely knew me, it was comforting.
The days folded into each other, whistles replaced clocks and military commands replaced choices. Slowly, we learned a language nobody taught us: Obey before complain. But beneath it, we were changing in silence and in different variations like people learning how to survive unfamiliar ground.
That was when it began.
A fellow corps member started calling me Omo Igbo instead of my name. At first, it started as a joke.
Omo Igbo, come here.
Omo Igbo, shift.
My name, Chinecherem, began to disappear in small pieces. It was not erased at once, so I didn’t immediately react until I had to remind myself I still had a name which wasn’t ‘Omo Igbo’.
Each time I heard Omo Igbo, my chest tightened inside me, and felt heavier like I was being reduced to something.
One evening, Lawrence came to sit beside me and said softly.
“This place is stripping everybody.”
“Maybe that is how you find what is left.” I replied, staring ahead.
“Or what is real.” He nodded.
“Same thing.”
On a certain morning that felt like all the others, I woke up before the whistle and stepped outside. The camp was still asleep and the sky over Bauchi was too wide for the thoughts I carried. For the first time, I understood without resistance.
I was not only far from home; I was far from the version of myself that had been prepared for me. Far from the daughter who existed only inside the expectations of my people. Far from certainty.
The bus did not know my name when I arrived. But that no longer mattered because I was beginning to retrieve my identity slowly, painfully and honestly for myself.
As the sun rose fully over the camp, I whispered into the morning air;
“My name is Chinecherem. The road forgot it but I did not.”