There's a moment every corps member knows. You walk into your PPA thinking you understand the terms of engagement..... teach your subject, keep your head down, survive to the next allowance alert. Then someone hands you a schedule that has nothing to do with what you signed up for.

For me, that moment came on a random Tuesday.

I had my French classes mapped out. I knew my periods, my classes, my rhythm. Then the Vice Principal called me into the staff office and said, almost casually, "Corper, you'll also be handling the debate club, and we need you to help supervise the girls' hostel inspection on weekends."

No warning. No conversation about whether I had the bandwidth. Just an assumption that because I was "the young, energetic corper," I was available for whatever needed filling.

I smiled and said "no problem, ma." Inside, I was doing the math on how a person is supposed to teach, run a debate club, supervise a hostel, and still have a life ...... all on an NYSC allowance and a service year that already felt like it was moving faster than I wanted it to.

It wasn't really about the extra hours. Corps members take on extra work all the time ...... that's half of what makes NYSC either character-building or soul-crushing, depending on the day.

What stressed me was the invisibility of the decision. Nobody asked. Nobody considered that I was also trying to build things outside the classroom ..... content, applications, a life after this uniform comes off in October. To the school, I was just an extra pair of hands that happened to already be on ground and didn't need paying.

That's the quiet tax a lot of PPAs place on corps members: your time is treated as free simply because your allowance already came from somewhere else.

I didn't storm into the principal's office quoting the NYSC handbook ..... that rarely works, and burning the relationship isn't worth it when you still have months left to serve. Instead,

I picked my battles. The debate club I could work with .... it was actually good exposure and gave me something to put on a CV. The weekend hostel supervision, I pushed back on gently, explaining I already had commitments (true ...... my content work and scholarship applications don't pause for anyone).

I set a visible boundary without making it a fight.

I stopped treating every request as an order.