Being A Stranger In My Hometown

Yeah the day we have been waiting for has finally arrived and it's Christmas day; merry Christmas 🎄 everyone Let the lights of Christmas guide you to success and prosperity and bring happiness and peace to your life.

I'm certain you guys are all enjoying the Christmas and for me at the moment I'm tired of eating chicken or turkey, basically anything good Because I'm filled up and I don't think I can drink water for now.

Back to my article, but before that kindly check out my awesome sponsors

Actually, my holiday was cut short this year because my school didn't release us on time, so I made the most of it by having to travel with my grandma to my hometown of Ereke in Ondo state, after which she returned home a day before Christmas after a lengthy journey.

This mattered a lot to me because it would be my first visit to my hometown, and I was anticipating what would happen. I'm not good at making friends, but I had this impressions that People would be willing to make friends because it was Christmas, and Christmas is all about giving and loving.

My laptop screen was cracked throughout the journey because of the groceries my grandmother packed on my back pack, and she had no idea my laptop was in there. So as soon as I arrived at our destination, I promptly sat down and began looking for a place to fix my laptop and thanks to read.cash and noise.cash I was willing to pay without asking my grandmother for money. Though she wanted to pay.

It was difficult to find a computer expert because it was the Christmas season, but I was fortunate enough to come across a shop with three computer engineers, and I walked inside the shop and they were all speaking my native language, ilaje, which I could comprehend but not speak.

So they began speaking to me in ilaje, but I was surprised to find that I couldn't comprehend everything because this was pure ilaje, unlike the ilaje my grandmother speaks to me, which is a blend of ilaje and Yoruba. To make a long tale short, one of them referred to me as "omo ajéji" (which means "alien from another state") simply because I couldn't respond in ilaje and my Yoruba was not particularly fluent.

During a dialogue with someone who understood English language in the shop to determine the price which I would pay for my broke laptop, My cousin called me to confirm whether we had arrived in our hometown , so we were speaking English and some broken English during the conversation with my cousin because he doesn't really understand yoruba, and when I ended the conversation, I noticed the manager was looking at me startlingly, and what he said next frightened me.

He shouted in ilaje language; “Tunde omà kàn ti gbè laptop was, ómà ekó ni, bà mi gbé awón alókun arà laptop wa, ati ri mugun";.... (Which implies Tunde, someone has brought a laptop and he has just arrived from Lagos; we've seen someone we can scam today, bring only the scrap and abolish part of a laptop screen.)

To be honest, I was baffled when I heard this, and I had no intention of saying anything, but my grandmother stepped in and blew my cover, asking me in my native ilaje language, “ shey wan ti bà ré tun laptop ré sé " (which means have they repaired my laptop), thus for the first time I replied to my grandmother in ilaje, although it wasn't very fluent, I just wanted those engineers and the manager to know I understood all they were saying all along.

The manager and tunde were caught off guard 😂, and their reactions were pretty hilarious. They apologized, and I forgave them, and they also gave me a discount because I was an ilaje.

This is what happened to me early on Christmas morning.

Thank you for taking the time to read this 💙.