When I first arrived in Europe from Nigeria, it was in the tick of the winter and there was snow all over. It was my first time to see the snow. My surprise was actually looking at the trees and flowers lining the roads as I was being driven out of Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. I realised they all appeared dead! The trees were standing like dead woods without leaves and I began to wonder what was still holding them from falling.

My mind immediately went back to my country Nigeria and I thought to myself that these trees must be very lucky to be in Europe. When I was growing up in a remote town called Ughelli in Delta State, my parents use to ask us to go into the forestation to fetch fire wood. These are usually woods cut from trees and used locally to make fire for domestic cooking. My mother always preffered to cook from fire wood fire because we could not afford to buy domestic cooking gas.

It was a dreadful labour for me at the time because it requires several kilometers of trekking and returning back with loads of wood on my head, sometimes with empty stomach in the heat of the scorching sun. I sometimes asked myself now if those loads on my head could have been responsible for my height deprivation (shortness).

Coming back to the "dead" trees on the road, I told myself silently that the trees were lucky not to be in Nigeria and most especially in Ughelli because people like me would have fell them long time ago for fire wood! They would have long been used for our domestic firewood cooking.

I was to get the shocker of my life when the same trees came back to life in the Summer season with their lofty and plushy green leaves. As if the surprise wasn't enough, they provided shade for me and I also saw people organise barbeque parties under the same trees that hitherto was suppose to be dead in my eyes during the winter.

The final lessons I learnt from this first Europe experience was that our life could be compared to the Trees in Europe whose life revolves around two seasons. There is always a Winter season (difficult times) in our life that we just can't help but remain and be confident that no matter how difficult the period might be, we will definately come to our Summer season (good times).

By

Comrade Sunny Ofehe