EVOLUTION OF A FRESHA

By Elizabeth Asasha

Now that you are five months old in Moi and about ten pounds underweight due to the frequent trots to and fro classes, I find it wise to refer to you as bona fide student of Moi Varsity instead of fresha. Well, too bad as it might seem since it has been such a short-lived opportunity and just to remind those who fortunately hooked up with the ‘campus elders’, very soon you will be filing a divorce case.

Allow me spare the cohabiting topic since it is not really within the realms of my experience but would rather like to make my point on the metamorphosis that most of us undergo. Institutions of Higher learning are boarded by people of different backgrounds and totally wide disparities in the social status, lifestyles, virtues and vices alike. It is also a zone where students undergo transformation, either negative or positive. Sadly, those who are not conversant with gate-keeping paradigm fall into a dungeon of vices. They are ultimately swayed to wrong ways.

Indisputably, those who join campus swearing and taking oaths never to fail their communities, families, friends and phantoms are the ones who fall gullible to the trap. They are easily hijacked in a morass of negative thoughts and drastic actions that untimely evaporates all the words of wisdom and proverbs bombarded to them by their elders. When my photoreceptors first met this young lady, apparently dazzling for the big ‘’reveal’’, it took my Central Nervous System minutes to give me a feedback on who the young lady before me was. She happened to be my “roomie” some months ago. 

The transformation she had undergone was dumbfounding from the dress code, walking style to her speech which I surprisingly realized that was dominated by obscene words and phrases. She frequently spit the “f” word like someone exhaling some toxic gases. As I trekked past her in a company of fellow beauty queens, fond memories of the my initial roomie unfolded in my neurons. The young and innocent roomie whose tabular rasa was fresh by then, never wanted to hear of “freshaz night”, “bongo night” or other night-out or related activities. 

According to her perception, only sinners were associated with them. She was a staunch choir member and an active church goer. I was at some point compelled to follow the trail of her to-be-emulated conduct.

Three months down the line, she only dreams of “fracas” and mind-formatting drinks. The pre-owned clad she constantly wears are the ones a kid from the village would term as those belonging to a newly born baby. Spending a night in the hostel on a Friday night would be an abomination and would soon graduate into a taboo! Yet, from the onset of the semester; she strictly adhered to the academic timetable like a Pharisee holding onto to the ten laws of Moses. “Uncompromised Class Attendance” was her middle name. The higher you go the cooler it becomes; hers was “the longer you stay the more civilized you become”; things have changed.

This is the situation that snares most of us. The paradox about this is that you will never know how it commences, and even if you do, there is always little effort to force yourself from the grip. It is after we start feeling the pinch, probably during our last days in campus that we have fallen from our mountain top of achievement into a valley of despair & predicament.

Trick enough, these memories tend to haunt us till the ultimate hour when colleagues’ clans chant their relic mantra, ululations and jubilations during graduation as those who stand aloof by their guts, destiny, life & karma bask into the glow of their academic achievement, you sag into a state of such severe depression and regrets a gang smoked out of their hideout.