What Inspired Me

The dream change everything

Things first began to go wrong with the rains.

Adebayo Ogunleye had lived in his one-room compound in Mushin for fifteen years, raising three children with wife Funmi after moving from Ibadan in search of better opportunities. He drove a danfo bus along Ikeja-CMS, making just enough to take care of his family in Lagos' tough life.

‎When in September the waste company ceased visiting, Adebayo thought it was temporary. "They will be back next week," he told Funmi as garbage bags began accumulating in their small backyard.

‎Next week never came.

‎The dump had accumulated to waist height within a month. Plastic packets of clear water, tin cans of tomato paste with no contents, vegetable peels, and the trash of survival rations formed a stinking pyramid at the rear of their two-room shophouse. Pungency began to attract flies, then rodents, then worse—disease.

Daddy, I don't sleep," whined eight-year-old Kemi, his youngest. Dark circles under her eyes had formed, and she had a cough that would not go away.

Adebayo phoned the local government. "We know what's going on," they said. "Be patient.".

‎He tried turning to private waste handlers, but their fees were astronomical—₦15,000 monthly, nearly half his take-home pay. He tried burning the rubbish, but complaining neighbors reported the toxic fumes, and his wife's asthma attacks grew more frequent.

‎Hopelessness descended like the Lagos sun.

‎November was the real horror. The rains were intense, and the garbage dump was a stinking bog. The smell was awful, seeping through their windows even when closed. Neighbors began avoiding their section of the street. Landlords in nearby compounds started evicting tenants, claiming the smell was driving away potential renters.

Adebayo's health began to deteriorate. The distress of watching his family fall sick and not being able to do anything about it tormented him day by day. His blood pressure rose. His hands shook perpetually. He grew thin, unable to eat normally due to the perpetual stench.

"We have to leave," Funmi pleaded one evening, crying openly. "The children are falling ill.".

‎But leave to where? With what money? Their savings were depleted. Getting another apartment required deposits that they could not make. They were trapped in their own home by circumstances beyond their control.

‎December 15th, as the harmattan winds blew the odor further, Adebayo made his last, desperate move. He'd carry the trash piece by piece on his danfo bus and dump it somewhere away from the city. It'd be dozens of trips, cost him hard-earned fuel money, and land him in trouble with his bus conductor's license if he got caught, but he couldn't help it.

‎He started at dawn, working alone in the gray dawn light. Load after load of festering trash, each trip sickening him, weakening him. The smell stuck to his clothes, his skin, in his lungs. His chest ached by noon. By afternoon, his vision blurred.

On that seventh trip, with a load that was particularly foul, Adebayo could feel his heart give way. The heft of the trash, the odor, the strain, that webbing of months of despair—it all coalesced into a crushing pressure behind the ribcage.

‎He veered onto the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, gasping, clutching his chest. Other drivers honked angrily as his bus blocked traffic. But Adebayo did not budge. The world spun around him. The stench of rotting trash filled his nostrils as the blackness swallowed him whole.

‎His last thought was of Kemi's cough, of promises he could not keep, of a system that had failed the humble human aspiration for dignity. ‎The bus sat for hours before someone heard the driver inside wasn't stirring. ‎--- ‎"Oya, wake up! You're having a bad dream!" ‎ ‎My eyes opened at the sound of my sister's voice, her hand gently shaking my shoulder. Sunlight peeked through the curtains in my Alimosho flat. My pillow was soaked with sweat.

"You were muttering in your sleep," she said frantically. "Talking about waste and some man called Adebayo. I woke up slowly, the dream fresh in your mind. All the details seemed real—the plea in Adebayo's eyes, the coughing of his children, the foul odor that had driven him to the edge.

Looking around my own bedroom, I noticed the small bag of household trash beside my door, to be thrown away. A nothing, actually, but in my dream, a matter of life and death.

On that day, I could not shake off the images from my mind. I walked through my Alimosho neighborhood, really seeing it for the first time. I noticed overflowing garbage bins, incineration of trash in small fires by families, children playing by trash heaps.

The dream had shown me something profound—how essential services others take for granted can be survival problems. How health and dignity are luxuries where systems fail.

How I Built The Project

I began with few resources but a robust sense of intent. I utilized Bolt.new

Vite and Typescript for speedy, reactive UI.

Supabase for auth and database.

Netlify for simple CI/CD and gratis deployment.

‎GitHub for source code management and Netlify auto-deploys.

Bought ‎scrubbed.online domain via Entri.

What I Learned

Technical skills are tools, but people are the platform.

Build for mobile first. Most people access the web from smartphones, so responsiveness was high on the list.

Failure is part of the process. Each bug, crash, or design problem honed the project.

Challenges I Faced

I have no personal laptop of my own, so it was quite inconvenient to use some of my family and friends laptop.
Supabase Query Slowness As request increased, some pages took minutes to render.

‏3. Deployment Blank Page After development with Vite, the Netlify production site would sometimes load as a blank white page.

‏4. DNS Errors Sometimes users were unable to access scrubbed.online for a few hours due to a DNS configuration error.