Just 3 short years ago, I launched a new company called ARREYB Media while I was in my second year of the University

And as the non-techy naive student with no skills in social media, I wasn’t able to make any money from it in the first year

I come from Cameroon (a central African country on the Gulf of Guinea) and when a heavy political crisis began in my country in 2017, I needed to find a means of surviving amidst the heavy gunshots, radical shootings, arrests and torture

It was a fight between the government military and an armed group of separatist fighters who want to secede to an independent state they call “Ambazonia”. The shootings made the entire regions silent, everyone stayed home and occasionally you would hear gunshots, and then death of a friend or neighbor – taken down by a stray bullet

It was kinda-like the virus shut the entire world in March 2020 where everyone went into a lockdown within days, and no fly was seen on the streets.

It was just gunshots, and in the midst of the gun battles between the military and freedom fighters, you could hear machine guns against pellets which lasted over an hour continuously like real war

And you had to pause in a particular spot for hours or sleep on the floor

And every of those days I stayed alive, I needed to feed, to make ends meet and make sure I survived the crisis. Sometimes the shootings will pause for some hours, and then we will rush out to stock the house with some food or basic house groceries