The Great Ethiope

Chapter 1

Third term was starting in a week. What is third term?, you ask, well a normal secondary school session is divided into three terms. The third term is more or less the term that determines if you move to the next class or not. I was presently in the third and highest senior class, or as we like to call it, SS3. The toughest of all classes.
SS3 third term was starting and I wasn't even prepared for the exams. It's a bittersweet sort of term because we don't get to carry on with normal school procedures but we have to write a long series of examinations. This is where the UTME comes in. We also like to call this one JAMB examinations, short for Joint Admission Matriculation Board. The other exams are the Mock, WAEC and NECO. In some schools, Mock exams are not compulsory because it is a school-given examination but in my school, Community Secondary School, it was compulsory as it forms your continuous assessment for the term. The West African Examination Council exams are very much important, almost as important as the JAMB exams, and finally the National Examination Council exams which is not so important but has to be written.
Where am I going with all this? Well, for you to understand, I have to explain from the lowest foundation so you don't get lost.
We had just started writing mock when we received news that JAMB was to be written during this period so you can only imagine how high my stress level spiked. Luckily for me, my JAMB exam was on a Saturday so no papers clashed. I was relieved.
My relief was short-lived when I discovered that WAEC was starting a few days after JAMB and we had not finished with our mock! We were beyond stressed and angry, in short, we were very irritable. We asked the school authorities to discontinue the mock but they refused, claiming that since we had already started, we had to finish it. It was like I had an angel sent from heaven who arranged the time table for me because I didn't have any paper from the two exams on the same day.
You can only imagine our relief when mock and WAEC ended and we received news that NECO was starting one month later. We didn't bother too much because our memories were still fresh from all the reading we did for the former three exams. We finished all these exams between June and July and my post-UTME was in August, luckily for me. I traveled down to Delta state two weeks before my exams. What? I missed my sister and the distance between Abuja and Delta state is not something to play with.