TEAM UNN won the last Hopeful Me School Competition in December 2020 and here's a massage from Arist John, one of the active participants. -- I have been part of the Hopeful Me team since 2019 after the Hopeful Me hangout in UNN that very year. The name itself did inspire me, the objectives the goals etc Before the quiz did take place I was not a very active user of Hopeful Me app neither was I an active member of my School Team (UNN). In as much as I appreciated the daily quotes and inspiration I was too reluctant to actually explore the platform and take the Hopeful Me activities seriously. I can't really say why, maybe it's because I only saw Hopeful Me as a social platform and nothing more. But I was wrong. How did I get to realize I was wrong? A day before our first quiz a classmate of mine chatted me up and told me about the quiz. I told her I might not have time for that. She used to be a close friend so she had her way of making me see reasons to do things. So I joined the group and ignorantly dropped an answer without knowing it wasn't our turn yet. That's to show you how I didn't take the quiz and everything seriously at first. We did the first quiz and we won. I didn't really foresee the quiz as something very serious. Not untill I saw the eagerness in my fellow team members, the zeal to win. The zeal to actually remind our opponents that "a UNN student is generally ahead of them". We had to keep that spirit, I had to keep the spirit too. I nearly gave up during our Semi finals and I must say that our win that day was God's intervention and a reminder from him also that we could be ahead of anybody we want. We made it to the finals and we pulled through in the finals. Few days ago, someone I knew, not a close acquaintance anyway committed suicide. He was into a whole lot of pressure to pay up a debt he didn't deliberately accumulate. The summary of the whole thing is that he did commit suicide. And when another friend of mine learnt about the fellows death she asked me; "does he not have a family who could have helped relieve him of the pressure?". And I pondered. Nowadays whatever we choose as a family becomes our family. And that's where I was wrong about Hopeful Me, I only saw it as a social platform and not a family where I can share my feelings. Where I can relive pressures. We were different schools fighting to win a competition but what I saw along the line was a family trying to make the most out of a moment. It's true that we did win, and one thing I'm sure is that every other person who participated in the quiz from other schools will want to participate next year and beat whoever dealt with them this year. So with this I'm sure that whoever might have wanted to commit suicide this very year or before the next quiz will have to wait till next year's quiz is over and with this one year life span have been added to him or her (I am kidding anyway, lol). I saw a family in Hopeful Me and I'm glad to become one of the Family. And since I realized Hopeful Me is not just a social platform but an entity of families, I dropped my single story about them as I await the new year to come so I can resolute to become an interesting member of the Team.