Last week, when thousands of recently graduated students from Nigerian higher institutions took off from their respective states of residencies with their needed baggage on a journey to several different locations around the country where they have been sent on the compulsory National Youth Service, I remembered my own such experience not too long ago, and the lessons I brought back home.

It is not quite three years ago when, as a freshly graduated Nigerian already waiting for news of my posting, I got a text message from a friend in school that I had been posted to Plateau state, about over a thousand kilometers from my place of residence, and surely one of the places I had never visited in my over twenty-something years of traversing my fatherland.

That challenge was intended, as the government of the country ruled in 1973 to institute an intra-national organization modeled like the American Youth Corps which would give recently graduated students of the country’s higher institutions the opportunity and privilege to get to know other areas, cultures and people of the country in an intensive twelve-month National Youth Service. More than just a sight-seeing tour, it would include games, orientation, community service projects and lots of other educative exchanges meant to engender national consciousness.

Many years now have passed since the laudable project began, and the country has even produced its first president to have passed through the scheme. Still, the NYSC grows stronger and – as some say – even better. And although many critics of the scheme point to the obvious futility in foisting national consciousness on countrymen so ethnically diverse, one could not ignore the priceless knowledge gained by ex-students in that one year rollercoaster of cultural exchange.

As a fresh graduate of linguistics, my first expectations were related to a harvest of tongues as I had been taught that Plateau state was Nigeria’s most linguistically diverse state. Contact expanded my discoveries to the culinary: people of the state turned out also to be a most dynamic in appetite and variety. And geography: a delight of art carved hills and rock formations serve to awe even the most skeptic sight. I saw the highest peak in Nigerian railway at Kuru, just some feet away from our Orientation Camp site where I spent my first four weeks on the Plateau.

Looking back now at the twelve months that flew past so much faster than I could count, I extend one hand in appreciation for the aims of the scheme and the other in best wishes for this year’s new recruits, for they should rejoice. The initial anxieties of leaving the nest for a new experience of culture and language might be a little testing at first, but will give way soonest to a refreshing vista of the many possibilities of inter-cultural exchange.