Just after our matric days, it is every student’s pride to learn that they have been accepted at a University or College away from home to further their studies, and this brings joy to our parents and family members too.
For many students, it becomes the first time living far away from home, sometimes in a place where you hardly know most of the people around you. By moving to Universities, with all the freedom of being independent, it sometimes makes people forget who they are, what they came for and often change their way of living. This happens because of the influence they get from their new friends and the so called “new family members”.
Gone are those days when a Tertiary institution has been a home of hedonist whereby students can harness all the pleasures that life has to offer to improve their health in sports and quality of good life, but the ideal of drug decriminalization is becoming ever more popular among our youth today.
In most tertiary institutions, the use of drugs and alcohol tend to be much higher than the general population. Students seem not to use drugs to cope with educational stress or be high at night but make their friends happy and think they are better and clever than everyone.
The most heart breaking part is that most students use drugs for fun and not noticing that it reduces a person’s capacity of thinking and that lead to a low academic performance. Drugs and alcohol causes grades to slides at that University level and they are no longer able to keep up with their studies and perform to the best of their abilities. Drugs and alcohol abuse cause people to stay in bed and miss exams, because they rather go party and have fun than being in class; and this kind of people end up in the streets alone healing broken wounds or in rehabilitation centres trying to mend their scattered pieces of life. Some even go as far as engaging on unprotected sex, which leads to unwanted pregnancies and diseases.
It’s a disgrace how our parents learn about this shameful way of living when they have to get academic performances of their beloved kids, not mentioning that devastating moment when they think of how they suffered for many years hoping to get the best out of you from their own pockets. Now they have to deal with the stress of losing their hard earned money and that you are in drugs or maybe addicted than making them proud. Most parents of addicts are always depressed and that even lead to heart diseases.
My motive behind this story is that, being independent or away from home doesn’t mean that one need to change their way of living, always be yourself, don’t sell yourself short in order to make anyone happy, you are the one who know where you coming from and your worth. All you need to do is to bring home what is expected from you, not a truck load of shame; but happiness and pride.
Article by: Winny Shokane
