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Far From Home
Not only do Nollywood high school movies project the struggles of the average Nigerian teen, but they also narrow the insight down to the various rungs of the social ladder. To serve as a sharp contrast to the privileged and promising teenager from Halloway High in ‘Leaked’, we have Ishaya Bello (Mike Afolarin) from Isale Eko in Far From Home. This production shows us life through the lens of a teenager from a lower-class family with dreams that might seem too big for his reality.
The first scene of episode one gives us a clear idea of Ishaya’s passion. It is a dream in which he’s giving an appreciation speech to the people present at his art exhibition. After this, his reality begins to play out. Ishaya is a secondary school graduate from a lower-class family whose ambition is to become a world-famous visual artist. His mother, Felicia (Funke Akindele), works as a cleaner and his father, Ishaya Senior (Paul Adams), doesn’t work due to an accident that left him paralyzed and confined him to a wheelchair.
At the beginning of the season, we see him selling his artwork in an effort to make money to travel to London for a mentorship programme he was selected for by his role model, an artist named Essien (Deyemi Okanlawon). However, Ishaya is not alone in the pursuit of dreams. His younger sister, Rahila (Tomi Ojo), dreams of getting into the prestigious pre-tertiary institution, Wilmer College, but is discouraged because her family cannot afford it. Not long after, Ishaya gets wind of the school’s scholarship programme that comes with a grant of ten thousand dollars and passes the information to Rahila. They go to the school to make an inquiry about the application, but Rahila backs down after being told that she would need to pay a sum of hundred and fifty thousand naira to register.
One day while Ishaya is cleaning at his mother’s client’s house, he overhears a conversation between the man (Femi Branch) and his son, Denrele (Raymond Umenze) regarding the same scholarship exam. Apparently, he has gotten the answers to the exam questions and he gives them to his son to memorise. In a bid to prove to himself and his father that he can pass the exams by his own efforts, he throws away the piece of paper containing the answers and Ishaya secretly picks it up and takes it home to his sister. Rahila turns down the offer because she doesn’t want to get in through shady means. Ishaya then realises that the scholarship – the grant money, actually – could be his ticket to success and take him to London for the mentorship programme, so he applies for it.
Sometime later, Ishaya comes back from the strip club where he works as a waiter and finds that his father has fallen ill again. He is shocked beyond words when he finds out that Rahila had told their mother about the wads of cash in Ishaya’s piggy bank and that the money had been used to pay his father’s hospital bills – all of it. This part of the production however marks the grey area; was Ishaya selfish and wicked, as his mother said, for not using that money to take care of family needs, or was he simply focused on his dream? Let’s talk about it.
There is a stage in every teenage boy’s life where a sense of responsibility is developed and the awareness that they won’t be boys for much longer fuels their actions. They start to think of ways to earn a living, just like Ebisinde from MTV Shuga Naija, and make life better for themselves, and looking at Ishaya’s background and then his outstanding talent, it is understandable that he would go through whatever means he deems necessary to achieve his dream.
Fans of the series judge him for applying to the school his sister wanted to go to but couldn’t, saying that he stole her dream, but if we think about it, had she not backed down already, despite his effort to help her achieve it? We also notice the risks he takes to raise money to get into Wilmer Academy. He steals money from his boss at the strip club, Government/Ijoba (Bucci Franklin), who happens to be a dangerous drug dealer. He also borrows money from his friend, Michael (Moshood Fattah) and asked for a few favours on credit. Ishaya’s tenacity was quite admirable. He didn’t let his circumstances affect the magnitude of his aspirations and it is safe to conclude that this can serve as a message to teenage boys and girls who share a reality similar to Ishaya’s.
After getting into Wilmer Academy, it is time for Ishaya to get his “prize money” (the grant) out of which he would repay everyone he borrowed or stole from, but “after removing the cost of books and uniforms”, the balance was five thousand naira (yes, e shock us as well). Eventually, Ishaya begins to sell drugs for Government to the students at his school to pay back the money he stole from him, and this leads us to another hot topic addressed in the production; substance abuse among teenagers.
Ishaya all but swears on his life that if he sold Government’s molly to the students at his school, he would pay him back in no time, and as it turns out, his prediction was right. The students at Wilmer Academy consumed drugs as often as they breathed. In a particular scene, Atlas (Olumide Oworu), Nnena (Ruby Okezie), Reggie (Natse Jemide), and Carmen (Elma Mbadiwe) are in the school bathroom smoking a type of marijuana Ishaya had never smelt before. Drug addiction however is depicted through Carmen.
Carmen survived a traumatic, life-threatening accident and never really got off the heavy painkillers that were prescribed to her, not even after her doctor said she could stop taking them. In one scene, we see her panicking when she can’t find the painkillers and then get into a fight with her mother because she took them.
We were all hurt at the end when her parents (Bimbo Akintola and Richard Mofe-Damijo) took her to rehab, but the truth is, that was the best thing they could do for her, and it was indeed a very bold step for her parents to take. Many parents struggle to come to terms with the fact that their kids might need professional help, and it is understandable. In this part of the world where ‘madness’ is the first thing that comes to the minds of most people at the sound of ‘mental health’, no one would be happy to accept that a child they birthed and nurtured needs to be helped mentally. But the longer a parent remains in denial, the higher the child’s problem escalates.
So, back to Ishaya. As much as we applaud him for his dedication to his ambition, we do not commend him for taking to illegal activities i.e. stealing and selling drugs, and to be fair, he wouldn’t have gotten himself into any of that if his mum hadn’t taken all of his money. This is a wake-up call to parents to support their children’s dreams and not think little of them. If Ishaya’s mother had believed in his dream, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did.
However, the real root of the problem is that Ishaya’s father had no source of income at all. He had stopped drawing and selling his artwork because of an accident that occurred when he was going to deliver a client’s work; an accident that cost him his legs and the life of his second son, Dauda. Over and over again, his wife accused him of ‘killing Dauda because of art’, and so out of guilt, he stopped drawing. This just shows us that the way parents treat each other inevitably affects their children’s lives.
All in all, Far From Home did an awesome job showing us the struggles of ambitious adolescents, particularly those from the lower class. Will there be a season two, though? We hope so!
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