The Things We Made

By the time I got into the upper classes, people in my class had started bringing me their problems. It wasn’t anything official. There was no position called “school mechanic,” and I certainly didn’t have the knowledge to deserve one. Somehow, though, whenever something stopped working, somebody would eventually say, “Go and call Prince.”

It started with small things. A desk that wouldn’t stand properly. A broken ruler. A wall clock that had stopped ticking. Once, someone brought me a ballpoint pen and asked if I could make it write again. I opened it, stared at the tiny spring that had fallen out, put everything back together, and somehow made it worse. The owner took the pen from me and walked away without saying a word. Tunde watched him go and burst out laughing.

“You’ve killed it,” he said.
“It was already bad.”
“It was writing before you touched it.”
“Then why did he bring it to me?”
“Because he thought you were a mechanic.”
I laughed and threw a piece of paper at him.
The truth was, I liked being asked. There was something satisfying about having a problem placed in front of me and being given the chance to figure it out. Sometimes I knew what to do. Other times I had to take things apart first and hope the answer was hiding somewhere inside.

One Monday morning, our class teacher walked in carrying a sheet of paper. She waited until the noise settled before telling us about the school’s upcoming inter-house exhibition. Every class would prepare something to display, and there would be prizes for the best projects. The announcement immediately turned the room into a debate.

“Let’s make a volcano.”
“We did that last year.”
“Then let’s make the solar system.”
“That’s boring.”
“What about a big house?”
“Who will build it?”

Everybody had an opinion. Nobody had a plan.
I was sitting near the window, drawing in the corner of my notebook. I had been sketching houses and roads without really thinking about it. After listening to the arguments for a while, I raised my head.

“What if we make a whole city?”
The room quietened for a moment.
Tunde turned around. “A city?”
“Yes. Houses, roads, shops, maybe a school. We can make cars too.”
“With what?”
“Cartons.”
That made several people laugh.

Our teacher didn’t laugh. She looked at me for a few seconds and asked, “And what exactly are you planning to do with this city?”

I looked down at my drawing. It suddenly seemed much smaller than the idea in my head.

“I don’t know yet, ma.”
A few students laughed again.
She smiled. “At least you’re honest.”
Then she turned to the class. “Fine. Let’s hear him out.”
That was how it began.

The next day, people started bringing cartons from home. Someone brought a bottle of glue. Another person brought a small tin of paint. Tunde arrived with a bag full of bottle caps and proudly announced that he had been saving them for years, even though none of us had ever seen him save anything.

For the first few days, our city looked terrible.
We cut cardboard walls that refused to stand straight. We glued buildings together only to watch them collapse ten minutes later. Someone painted an entire section of the base before realizing we hadn’t marked out the roads. One of the girls in our class spent almost an hour making a tiny cardboard house, only for another student to accidentally knock it off the table while reaching for a ruler.

She nearly cried.
“Leave it,” I told her. “We’ll make another one.”
“You’ll make it?”
“Yes.”
“You said the last one was finished.”
“I know.”
She stared at me.
“Then why did you say we’ll make another one?”
I shrugged.
“I’ve learned something now.”
She smiled despite herself.

That became the rhythm of those afternoons. We built something, it failed, we argued about whose fault it was, and then we built it again. Slowly, the empty table at the front of the classroom began to look like a place.

There were houses on one side, a school in the middle, a little market near the road and a football field squeezed into a corner. We used coloured paper for roofs and tiny pieces of wood for poles. Bottle caps became tyres for the cars. The smallest scraps of cardboard became benches, signboards and anything else our imagination could turn them into.

I wanted one thing more than everything else.
Streetlights.

I had seen the lights along major roads whenever we travelled through town at night, and I wanted our little city to have them too.

The problem was that nobody knew how to make them.
I told our teacher I could do it.
She looked at me over her glasses.
“Can you?”
“I think so.”
“That’s different from knowing how.”
“I’ll try.”
She smiled. “Just don’t set my classroom on fire.”
I promised.

That afternoon, I went home and searched through the collection of things I kept in an old container under my bed. There were wires, pieces of old toys, dead batteries, screws, switches, tiny bulbs and things I had forgotten the names of. I selected what I thought might work and carried everything to school the next morning.

My first attempt did nothing.
The second attempt produced a tiny spark.
I jerked my hand away so quickly that Tunde nearly fell off his chair laughing.
“You said you knew what you were doing!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said it would work.”
“I said I would try.”
“Your trying almost killed you.”
“I’m still here.”
“Unfortunately.”
I pushed him away and went back to the wires.

For the next several days, I kept changing the connections. Sometimes the bulb stayed dark. Sometimes it flickered once and died. Once, I connected something wrongly and the wire became hot enough to make me drop it.

I began to get frustrated.

The exhibition was getting closer, and our city was nearly finished. Everyone else had moved on to painting signs and arranging the buildings. I was still sitting over the same tiny bulb.

One afternoon, when most of the class had gone home, I was alone at the table trying another arrangement.

I connected the battery.
Then the wire.
Then the bulb.
Nothing.
I frowned and checked the connection again.
Still nothing.
I was about to pull everything apart when the bulb flickered.
I froze.
It flickered again.
Then it stayed on.

A tiny yellow light appeared at the top of the cardboard pole.
For a few seconds, I didn’t move.
“Guys!”
My voice echoed through the empty classroom.
Nobody answered.
I ran into the corridor and shouted again.
“Tunde!”

He appeared at the doorway with two other students.
“What happened?”
I pointed at the table.
They stared.
The little bulb was still glowing.
Tunde’s mouth opened.
“You actually did it.”
I grinned.
“I told you.”
“You said you weren’t sure.”
“I was sure.”
“You just spent three days saying you weren’t sure.”
“Forget that.”

He laughed and called the others over.

Within minutes, half the class had gathered around the table. Someone switched off the classroom lights, and suddenly our cardboard city looked completely different.

The tiny streetlights glowed against the painted roads. The little houses cast shadows across the base. Even the crooked buildings looked better in the darkness.
For a moment, nobody made fun of it.
We simply stood there looking.
Our city was only made of cardboard, glue and old pieces of wire, yet somehow it felt alive.
Our teacher eventually walked in and stopped at the door.

“What happened here?”

Tunde pointed at me.

“He did it.”

She walked closer.

“Prince, how did you manage this?”

I looked at the wires.

“I just kept trying different connections.”

She nodded slowly.

“That’s how you learn.”

I didn’t say anything.

I was too busy looking at the lights.

The exhibition came on Friday.

Parents filled the school compound. Teachers walked from table to table with notebooks in their hands. Students stood beside their projects, explaining things they had spent weeks preparing.

Our city sat near the entrance.

It wasn’t perfect. One building leaned slightly to the left. The market had a roof that was too large for its walls. The football field looked like someone had dropped a green piece of paper onto the cardboard. One of the cars had only three wheels because we had run out of bottle caps.

Still, people stopped to look.

A woman bent over the table and asked who had built the streetlights.

Tunde pointed at me before I could answer.

“He did.”

She looked at me.

“You made them?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

I told her.

She smiled and said, “Keep doing this.”

Then she moved on to the next display.

I watched her leave.

Keep doing this.

It was such a simple thing to say, yet I remembered it.

By the end of the day, we were exhausted. The excitement had worn off, and everyone just wanted to go home. We began taking the city apart piece by piece.

The houses came down first.

Then the roads.

Then the little signs.

The streetlights were the last things I removed.

I carefully pulled the wires from the cardboard and wound them around my fingers.

“You’re keeping those?” Tunde asked.

“Of course.”

“Why?”

I looked at the wires in my hand.

“I can use them again.”

He shook his head.

“You keep everything.”

Maybe I did.

When I got home that evening, I put the wires, bulbs and batteries into the same old container under my bed. The little cardboard city was already gone, scattered across different homes and rubbish bins around the school.

I sat on my bed for a while thinking about it.

I had enjoyed the building.

I had enjoyed the drawing.

I had enjoyed figuring out the wiring.

I had even enjoyed the arguments when things went wrong.

There were too many things I liked.

That was beginning to worry me.

Adults had started asking questions that sounded simple but never had simple answers.

“What do you want to become?”

I usually gave them whatever answer came to mind.

“An engineer.”

Sometimes I said, “An inventor.”

If I had been listening to music before they asked, I might say, “A music producer.”

When I was drawing, I wanted to be an artist.

When I was fixing something, I wanted to become an engineer.

When I was building something from cardboard, I wanted to invent things.

I didn’t understand that one day I would have to choose what to do with all those interests.

At that age, I still believed there would be enough time for everything.

I had no idea how quickly life was going to start asking me to choose.