Celebrating Culture and Learning New Skills: My NYSC Camp Experience.

During my service year, which was supposed to last for a year, you have the first 21 days to go to your NYSC camp to do the activity with the military personnel and go through some training that will really certify you to be a corps member. During the stay in the NYSC camp, we did different activities like the social night, carnival that comprises different tribes, football competitions within different platoons, volleyball competition, badminton, table tennis, and lots more. Platoons have been coming out and winning different trophies, and my platoon has not been left out of the winning streak.

But for this week we did carnival yesterday, and we also did skills acquisition, and I was able to go to where we were taught how to make Aso Ofi. This is a locally made clothing material that is used to make different styles of clothes depending on the occasion you want to use them for. Actually, it's not like I want to go into fabrics and clothing, but I just felt like it was necessary for me to get something into my head and to have an idea about it. Probably in the near future I might be interested in making fabrics, and it will be easy for me to go into it.

The fabric was led by Mr. Philip Adio, and he took his time to explain everything that entails and costs to make the Aso Ofi clothing material. Right from the start, all the threads are lined on the threading stick, which allows easy spreading of the thread in different colors. After you have lined it on the stick with different teeth, it will be wrapped manually and taken to the manual machine to weave the clothing into fabrics that will then be sent out for final consumption.

This is another easy way of making money, even though it comes with a lot of stress because it is manually operated, but still you are still able to make some money from it. So far you can get the fabric to weave. After the skill acquisition, we went for the carnival, which comprises 10 plots with different tribes and cultures, and my platoon represents the Igede culture, who are the middle belt. There were lots of judges that were standing to check out the dressing, the costume, and the way people represent the culture. Actually, I was unable to participate in this edition because I had other things I was working on.

At the end of the culture presentation, I was never thinking my platoon was going to win because I felt we were not really dressed to suit the occasion. But one thing that surprised me was that when the positions were announced at the end of the program, we were not called as the first, second, or third, so I was wondering what we were going to actually go home with. So to my surprise, we got the award for the best-dressed tribe, and we won the overall best for the most presented culture and heritage. This made me so happy because we needed this award, which was one of the greatest and one of the top awards in the whole competition. So I was happy that the money spent was not, and at the end of the program we all made merry and went back to our hostels.

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