THE AMELIORATION

Sesuur is trying tonnes of different things during this lockdown. The lockdown that has kept everyone safe in their homes since February, 22nd. About 184 days have passed. Six months of staying at home to others, but six good months of tremendous improvement to Sesuur. Sesuur is thinking of the next new, big thing to do. What has he not tried? he thinks.

When the lockdown began, everyone thought they’d get back to their normal living as soon as possible; they thought the lockdown would last for three weeks, or four weeks. If very long enough, they hoped they’d get back to working, schooling, traveling, hustling and bustling, holding concerts and conventions in large, audience filled halls, in the first week of April. But as nothing happens the way people hopefully expect, this expectation was not seeming feasible. And it was in this first week of April, when no one was going to be out of their houses, that Sesuur revisited his secondary school notebooks. He saw that his handwriting had improved muchly since he started university and his writing vocabulary, too, ameliorated greatly. Comparing how he used to write – his grammar- to how he now writes, he felt proud of himself. If a person like him had not found himself in the right environment that enhances an individual’s improvement, he would have deteriorated drastically.

Sesuur didn’t start primary school early. At sixteen, one is supposed to be out of secondary school, preparing for university. Sesuur, at sixteen, was in Junior Secondary School III, so, he finished secondary school at nineteen. Children who don’t start primary school when their mates do often have lower academic performance, both in primary school and secondary school, even in the university. As a university teenager, you might sit in a lecture hall with someone twice your age, and still get better results at the end of the semester. Sesuur was definitely not the best even in his last year in secondary school, but he got a scholarship thereafter. This was because he was well behaved. In mission schools, it is your behavior that rewards you. Your good behavior gets you to good places, and vice versa; not some outstanding academic brilliance. As serendipity had it, St Paul’s Secondary School got into partnership with a new mission university during Sesuur’s last year at St Paul’s, and he was one of five selected from forty as the scholarship beneficiaries. It was in his first year in university that the lockdown began. Bearing in mind that the lockdown would not last, Sesuur did not go home, coupled with the fact that the university is far from home, a thousand-and-five-kilometer journey. He has been feeding well- the university provides that- so, all he worries about is the next new thing to learn.

When he saw he has gotten a new, good handwriting, and vocabulary, he used the month of April to read a lot of books. In a day, he read two books of two hundred and more pages, and had four hours of rest. In May, he did bunches of monologues, being both William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and many other acts. When summer drew near, he got interested in learning the condiments of music, and he did learn. He studied the staff notations and solfa notations, that by the end of the summer he was already sight reading Wolfgang’s Hallelujah. Autumn is here, and there’s still no sign of the beginning of the end of this lockdown.

Sesuur does know that a changed person is what he has become. His brain has felt an immense amount of strain, he, too, feels it. The troubling topics in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology is what he is now set to conquer. When this is done, and the end of the lockdown still tarries, he will search for whatever that troubles him, and he will break its back.

*Fiction