21/05/2026
𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐒𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐋
Here, the red earth holds the weight of early mornings,
of students climbing hills before the sun remembers its duty,
Books pressed to chests like scripture,
faith tucked quietly into the pocket alongside lecture notes.
I have heard the chapel sounds cut through fog and heat
and watched a hundred sleepy eyes grow still,
as if even God pauses here
to listen.
This is not a place we arrived at easily.
Mothers sold what the season allowed.
Fathers made silence do the work of prayer.
Some of us carried the grief of a broken region in our bones
and still showed up, still sat down, still opened the page.
Cameroon Christian University Institute did not promise us comfort.
It promised us something older and more difficult:
the chance to become.
In our lecture halls, packed as market mornings,
knowledge moves like a thing alive,
passing from mouth to ear, from board to eye,
from the teacher's worn conviction
into the student's cautious hope.
We have studied by the mercy of failing light,
organized our futures on borrowed time,
watched rain fall on the Bamenda hills
and understood that even storms have direction.
Here, discipline is not a cage.
It is the grammar by which we learn to speak
in rooms the world does not yet know we are in.
Service is taught not only in the classroom
but in the way we hold the door,
share a meal, sit with a struggling peer
at a table none of us asked for
but all of us needed.
We are not simply students.
We are the evidence of a community
that refused to stop believing in its children
even when believing cost something real.
And when I walk these grounds at dusk,
when the light goes amber over the rooftops
and somewhere a voice rises in evening prayer,
I do not feel like a stranger to greatness.
I feel like someone who belongs to something
that will outlast my enrollment,
outlast my name on any list,
outlast the season of my uncertainty.
This is not just where I came to study.
This is where I learned what I am made of.
This is where faith and knowledge held each other up.
This is where my people's sacrifice became my purpose.
This is my school.
