Fope's Blog

As you may have noticed, things look weird/different right now on the blog.  Please bear with us. Somewhere between me trying to add "web-developer" to my bucket of all trades, I messed with something that I haven't figured out. I'm now eating my humble pie as I seek help from someone who knows this stuff. Thank you for hanging in there and trusting that it'll be even better looking when next you stop by. xx Fopsy

Yours truly made it to the Island this week!  Well... it is quite posh. I don't know if it's the idea I have of it in my head that's making me look at it through rose-coloured glasses, or if the island really is more 'chilled' than the mainland. I think it's a little of both. So far, there have been no potholes on the roads, just weird highs and lows that must be because it's still Nigeria and road maintenance isn't a serious thing. Let me list some similarities I've observed: 1) Traffic. Theirs might even be worse than ours is on the mainland. 2) People are still aggressive and oblivious to the rules of the road. 3) NEPA is still unreliable.  4) Houses are still ridiculously massive and beautiful. I can't keep taking pictures, but really, our people know how to spend their money! As for differences... 1) Things are more expensive here.   2) All those things I saw on Instagram that I wanted to do in Lagos are here!!! There

Life. It's short and unpredictable and weird, but still very full of good things. So much can happen within a short period of time. T wo months ago, I had one great-grandmother and two grandmothers.  Today, I have one grandmother left.  We kind of knew it was coming, but you're never fully prepared for deaths. Still, it's real and we are here planning two burials simultaneously.  It 's interesting. Well, not interesting, maybe weird is the word I meant to use. Photo by Temi Coker via Instagram  See, one of the main reasons I wanted to come home was to see my grandparents, because it felt like death was looming. But thanks to some twisted happenings, we didn't get to see. And here I am writing about life and it's weirdness. Just look at what has happened around the world in this month alone (Paris, Nigeria and Mali to name a few). You could literally be here one moment and not the other. Since my first encounter with the death of a loved one , I already

In other personal news, I've been sick for about a week and a half. It hasn't been the overwhelming type of sickness where I can't do anything, but it has been hitting me in bouts. Long story short, I have malaria but I don't. There's this weird explanation that because I'm taking anti-malarial medication every week, the malaria parasite can't stay in my blood. However, because I've been exposed to mosquitoes and the novelty of my church's camp environment, I'm showing symptoms of malaria and possibly a lingering infection. But I won't fully break down because my antimalarial is working and so is the antibiotic I started earlier. I don't even know how I feel about that. Is that what I paid all those plenty dollars for in form of travel medication? To be semi-sick? Lol. I'm seeing food and I have no interest in eating it? But I need to shed my newly added 2kg anyway so maybe it's a win. Image Source   I have no idea why I spe

I like to think of myself as a retired amebo. If people ask me what I used to do before I started living for Jesus that I no longer do, I'll point to amebo behaviour. An amebo is a person who displays a cluster of behaviours ranging from gossiping to backbiting to excessive gist-scouting and really just thriving on idle talk. Hopefully you get the drift. I believe that deciding to intentionally live for Christ has caused me to become more aware of ways in which I still display traces of my old self. So maybe there are still traces of this amebo 'skill-set' that make this week's post possible.  From the conversations I've overheard and the things I've seen, people are becoming very health conscious. Before I left Nigeria, the adults in my life used to get upset about 'meatless meals' and portion sizes that didn't correspond with their physical sizes. But now, I'm seing that older educated folks are forgoing dinner, replacing white carbs with w

I saw this video during the week and shared it on Facebook with this long caption that was pretty much an endorsement. It was something like "Yup, we definitely have a culture of aggression (plenty yelling and noisiness), and politeness is often misinterpreted as  didirin  [half-witted]   behaviour. Or how else would you explain why it is so weird to say "please" and "thank you" to a shop attendant to whom I'll still pay money?" But I deleted the post after five minutes because I felt like I had been too active on Facebook recently. I know,  I know, who does that? Me. I'm on this constant self-regulation thing where I'm thinking about my own thinking, my words, actions and inactions. Sometimes it's helpful in making sure I'm conscious of how I'm living and other times it's just draining. Then , I come to my dashboard on blogger and I see that my e-big sister (who doesn't know it yet)  Sisi Yemmie , has shared the same vid