My Most Unforgettable Culture Shock Moment — NYSC, Jigawa (Duste Camp)

The first morning I woke up in Duste camp, I thought I had somehow been rerouted to a different planet.

I am from Lagos. I grew up with noise — generator fumes at midnight, danfo conductors screaming destinations at 5 AM, the perpetual organised chaos of a city that never truly sleeps. So when I stepped outside my hostel at Duste and heard silence — actual, unbroken, almost holy silence — my brain genuinely did not know what to do with it. I stood there for a full minute, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Just harmattan wind, a pale orange sky, and a goat looking at me like I owed it money.

Then came the food.

Tuwo shinkafa with miyan kuka. I will be honest with you: I stared at that plate the way you stare at an exam question you did not read for. Back home, lunch was jollof rice or eba and egusi — things my body understood. This was a smooth, dense mound of rice paste sitting in a dark, slightly slimy soup made from baobab leaves. My bunkmate — a Kano boy named Hamza — watched me poke at it with a spoon and nearly collapsed from laughter. *"Oga, use your hand. The soup will make sense once you stop fighting it."

I used my hand. The soup made sense.

That moment cracked something open in me. Not dramatically — quietly, the way light comes in under a door. I had arrived in Jigawa carrying Lagos in my chest like a passport, fully convinced that my way of doing things was simply the way. Hamza's laughter was not mocking. It was an invitation. And the food — once I stopped treating it like a cultural obstacle and started treating it like a gift — was genuinely one of the most comforting things I had ever eaten. Rich, earthy, warm in a way that settled your whole body.

Duste taught me that culture shock is really just arrogance meeting its edges. The things that made me uncomfortable were not wrong — they were just unfamiliar, and I had confused the two.

Nigeria is not one thing. It is thirty-six arguments happening at once, and somehow, miraculously, also a family. NYSC throws you into the middle of that argument with no referee and a khaki uniform, and the best thing you can do is put down your spoon, use your hand, and let the soup make sense.