Snatched from The fire  (3)

It was the girls that attracted me to him. I was a truant in secondary school and I barely went to school. I indeed dressed up every morning and my mum dropped me off at the school gate but I just waited until she was out of sight before finding my way to the next game centre, All I did those days was play snooker, I gambled on the game and make enough money to eat and drink some alcohol.

I was attending Bashorun High School. My parents were not very rich but they had built a house and we were living there. My daddy and older brother were in Port Harcourt at the time. My dad was working with a chemical plant while my brother was studying for admission into the university.

 I stayed at home with my mum, my twin sister, and my younger sister. My truancy was not artificial, I never liked school, My parents couldn't just get it into their thick skulls at the time that they could have a child who wanted nothing to do with school and academic endeavours. All I wanted to do was learn a trade or a skill, breathe some fresh air, and be free of all the pretense. It was while I was sneaking my way to a game center that I saw Bamzy and two girls they were not walking hand in hand or anything like that.

He walked into the main gate of the estate and the ladies casually walked into the gate almost twenty seconds after  I was on the other side of the main road when I saw them he opened the door and two ladies walked into the compound I knew what was going to happen, he was going to have sex with them I forgot about the game I was going to play I wanted in on that action so I went to his house and knocked on the gate, I knocked for almost an hour but there was no response I went to play my game, returned to the estate at about 3 pm and knocked on the gate again this time around the security man responded and allowed me in to see him.

When I got to him, he was in his room, fully clad in his uniform I asked him why he didn't go to school he said he went, I pressed him by explaining that I saw him earlier that day sneaking into the estate with two girls wearing Ansarudeen secondary school uniform. After some back and forth, he admitted it, this was how I joined him.

 We would meet under the Bashorun bridge every morning at about 9 am, buy some things that we needed to have a good time, and then go to the secondary school beside the gas depot opposite our estate to pick up babes. We were all teenagers and to be sincere we didn't really know what we were doing. We would sometimes hang out at game centers and play snooker all day, at other times, we would stay at his house and have orgies.

 There was a neighbor of mine who also didn't like school and would sometimes tag along. We were always careful until the Eid il Fitri of 1997 when I gambled my way into a huge pile of debt I didn't know it was a set-up, none of us knew it.

 We went to the club, got drinking and fooling around. A  guy from the club, not a staff but a guy who frequents the club came to tell us about this guy that came into the hotel beside the club with a lot of money and had been squandering the cash anyhow. We watched and saw that the guy was just doling out cash at all the games, he kept losing and also kept betting I challenged him to a game of snookers we had a 100,000 Naira bet and I won, we bet again and this time he raised the money to 250,000 Naira I fell for it, we played and he won then we played again and he won then we played again and he won again. The others also played against him and he won. Before you knew it, we were swimming in almost 2 million Naira debt, we didn't have such an amount anywhere and this was the kind of debt you cannot go home and discuss with your parents.

 When they began to slap us around asking for their money, Big T, the mastermind of the whole con came to our rescue. He promised them that he would pay the debt, and he then told us what we had to do for him he said a friend of his would be coming to Ibadan from Abuja with a lot of money.

 This friend owns a bureau de change business and would be coming in with a lot of cash he would like us to get the cash off the guy and bring everything to him. He asked if we could drive and we nodded we had all been driving since we were twelve or thirteen years old it was either we do the job or die, there was no third option.

There were no mobile phones in those days, so none of us could chicken out and send an SOS message to anyone. We got in the car and drove to Bodija Estate Extension which was the address given to us. The man arrived at 6:15 pm or thereabouts, we jumped out of the car with our weapons, emptied his car of all the travel bags, and drove furiously out of the estate. It was while we were on our way back to the hotel that another friend said he suspected that once we delivered the bags we would either be killed or our tongues cut off so that we wouldn't be able to identify or snitch on them.

 We realised the observation to be true and decided to go to Bamzy's house to find a solution to our problem. While we were there, talking and thinking we smoked some cannabis and that was how we all slept off. We didn't know when Bamzy's mum arrived home or the state she found us in,

It was around 10 pm that our parents came to pick us up one by one. As for me, that day was hell on earth, my older brother flogged me within an inch of my life I could barely sit down for two weeks.

My daddy took me with him to Port Harcourt I was under strict house arrest for almost two years. I eventually wrote my exams and gained admission into Yabatech. It was almost five years later that I got an email from Pastor B from New York he told me everything that happened and how his parents took over the whole mess and sorted it out.

I was much older by that time and I understood the gravity of the risk his mother took just to protect four foolish boys who were hell-bent on destroying their futures for nothing.

There was this church called Agape Parish, located very close to my house at the time, I went to the church the following Sunday just to thank God for preserving my life and destiny I knew I didn't deserve it. It was during that service that I met my wife she was one of the praise leaders in the teen's church, I fell in love with her at first sight and did everything I could to have a chat with her after the service. We became friends but she refused to date me because I was not born again.

I gave my life to Christ the following Sunday I got baptized in the Holy Spirit a month later, I got a better job with an engineering firm two months later, I proposed to my wife a year later and she said Yes, We got married in 2008.

I became a pastor in 2012 and I have lived my life as led by the Holy Spirit since the day I gave my life to Christ.

 PS: I share this testimony today because I know it was by divine leading that we were able to clear out the mess we made by ourselves. Pastor B's mother used all her professional connections and experience to solve the problem for us. Many may see it as unfair because there is a course the law and justice were meant to take and we did not take that course. Somehow we survived the murky waters we found ourselves in. For this, I give glory to God the experience however shaped all of us and deterred us from going forward with a life or reality of crime. Blessed be God.
 -GSW-