MY IMMIGRATION DIARY – PRAISE FOWOWE

In the beginning

If you are from Nigeria, you should by now you should be familiar with the word #JAPA right? If you are not from Nigeria or from Africa #JAPA is the slang for those who are running away from one country to another due to the unpleasant circumstances in their home country.

I have always been fascinated with the idea of living abroad from my childhood and I always talked about it and even sometimes blamed my dad for declining an opportunity to pick a scholarship he was offered few years before I was born.

I always believed in Nigeria and still believe in my country because I have no other country and my work over the years in Nigeria would attest to the fact that I pioneered all sorts of groundbreaking work in Nigeria. In case you are not however let me introduce myself because this is going to be a long series;

I was admitted to study sociology at the University of Ado – Ekiti but switched to Accounting because everyone I spoke to told me the only job that was available for sociologists was teaching way back in the year 1995. But guess what? I never liked calculations but saw accounting as my passport to wealth because I really loved to make money. I must say I struggled with the mathematical side of things but I graduated with a second class lower without flunking any course all through my stay in school.

While in school I was the go to guy for people with relationship problems and I was the one to investigate guys who were asking babes out to be sure they were not going to be scammed by dudes who were double-dating and just wanted to have sex with those babes.

I graduated from school and my mandatory youth service introduced me into the world of social innovation and my first field work post school(by then I had lost interest in accounting) was disguising as a customer to get into brothels and ‘Toast prostitutes out of prostitution’

But I had studied a pattern enough to know what to innovate. I noticed the more i talked them out the more others went in to replace them so i set up a Sunday evening meeting in Ajegunle(a densely populated ghetto) called 'Gold in the Slum' to raise solution providers and prevent them from getting into prostitution.

The meeting was a major hit as we started recording 480 young minds who later went back to school and some have become super professionals with our first PHD holder emerging 2 years ago.

That was my first innovative solution but while solving that problem I noticed of all the over 300 commercial sex workers i interfaced with there was not a single one who was not a victim of child sexual abuse.

My innovative instinct kicked in and i decided to research and innovate a solution that would empower families against child sexual abuse.