Living La Viva Hostel

By Stanley Mogu 

Home is sweet. But even life at home cannot be compared to the life in a hostel.

At home, elders are present to rein in excesses of young ones who are scarcely able to frame private timetables. Most times you share everything … one room, one kerosene lantern … and often, when it’s time to study, family members tend to disturb your reading with their idle chatter.

                The hostel is a very different kettle of fish where the greatest blessing is independence. You sleep whenever you like and if you get up late, no query! Apart from ground rules and regulations essential to keep the hostel from turning into a zoo, in the hostel, everyone is his own master. It’s a haven for freedom-seekers.

                In the hostel, opportunities for diverse social combinations abound as students get to make friends with older roommates as well as age mates. Arguments continually throb convivially in different corners, supporting one’s favourite football club, movies, actors and actresses, musicians and dancers. The eating competitions are classic fun, and though they attract no award, such activities sure put more juice in life than living at home does.

                In a hostel, students of different persuasions have to interact and coexist and much is learned. Good students are positive examples for other hostellers and bad students are good examples of how not to be. Cooperation, sympathy and love are characteristic of the hostel life, while healthy competition and inspiration abound:  weak students get help ( like when one is ill, everybody rallies to get you back on your feet) and  when a student sees roommates competing for various positions in their departments or faculties, he’s motivated to do same, thus chalking up vital social and political dexterity.

I would not be exaggerating to say that a hostel is the best place for all-round personality development … especially as it teaches you how to exist with people many find obnoxious and privately wish would simply vanish without a trace from the face of Earth.

                Hostel life however also has drawbacks; the atmosphere can overwhelm young, first-time dwellers for whom the unaccustomed freedom can be a potent intoxicant. They could begin smoking, gambling and drinking to inebriation, on the less harmful end of the scale and getting initiated into forbidden fraternities on the more dangerous other end. Visits to the cinema and other social outlets could also become routine, causing such students to squander their time, thus treading the path of academic doom.

Indeed, while parents send their children to the hostel for a more conducive academic environment, many get seduced by the unbridled independence and, as long as they go on receiving money, give scant thought to what it’s supposed to help them achieve. Precious time and hard-earned funds are fritted away like air, leaving such students, later in life, to repent of their foolishness too late.

The good, the bad and the ugly considered, however, any university student who has stayed in the hostels will attest that it is, indeed, a home away from home.