I have known Olatunde Olasunkanmi for several years. We lived in the same local government (County) Amuwo Odofin. Olatunde and I were not close friends, but I have always admired him as a person. He has an awesome personality, which is why I respect him a lot. His choices of friends are always the responsible, the intellectual, and the focused.

A year after Olatunde came to the States, I got an F-1 to study at Minnesota State University. My dad contacted his friend in Chicago and told him I got a visa to study at MNSTATE, and he assured my dad he has a friend in Minneapolis I could live with and go to school from his house everyday.

I left Nigeria on the 16th of July 2013, and landed in Chicago the next day. After spending a few days in Chicago, my dad’s friend realized that the distance between where his friend in Minneapolis lives and MNSTATE is three hours away. So I figured I needed to act on my own.

I was speaking with a friend on Facebook and I told him about my situation, and he suggested I contact Olatunde.

I went on Facebook and search for Olatunde Olasunkanmi, and fortunately he was online. I immediately sent him a message asking if he knew me, and he replied, “Why would I not?” I told him about how I was going to be stranded in Chicago because of the distance between the college I was meant to go to and my dad’s friend’s house.

He told me how flexible and affordable it is to attend Seward County Community College, and how nice the people of Liberal are. He told me how to get to Liberal from Chicago, and he picked me up from the train station at Garden City. He helped me with my registration, introduced me to his friends, and he also helped me with my accounting assignments.

Olatunde is someone I hold in high esteem for letting me and some other Nigerians gather in his house to have some Nigerian time. And the fact that I’m still able to eat some Nigerian foods such as pounded yam and egusi soup away from home makes me very appreciative of his generosity.

Egusi soup is a unique type of soup that can be eaten with several other meals such as Amala, pounded yam, eba, and fufu. According to Derric Moore, math teacher and head of the math lab center at SCCC, “I met a Nigerian engineering graduate student called Femi when I was an engineering undergraduate student at Praire View A&M University, Texas. He helped me with my engineering assignments, and I helped him with his projects because he was going to miss the deadline to turn his project in. Femi invited me to his house for a show of appreciation for helping him type his projects, and he gave me eba and egusi soup, and I have been in love with the food ever since.”