Community and The Neighbours We Never Knew

The Vanishing Neighbours

It was only a few weeks ago that I had a conversation in the office kitchen, near the coffee machine. I was curious as to why a company on our floor seemed to keep a three-day week. They were in on neither Monday nor Friday.

The lady I spoke to said that they worked from home on Mondays and had Fridays off. As usual, this week I did not expect them in on Monday, but by Tuesday it became apparent that they had gone. The hive of activity that sat between my office and the kitchen became a scene of eerie calm and emptiness. A part of my office community had gone without notice.

Communion and Loss

Earlier in the week, during Communion at church, people lined up for the gifts. My place in the seating arrangement means that I am one of the first congregants to go forward, ahead of others.

After returning to my seat for contemplation and to listen to the choir sing, I could also watch the other congregants go forward for the breaking of bread. A male couple usually sits to the side, on the right as one looks towards the altar, but only the taller of the two went forward.

It seemed peculiar, as they were never apart, and the shorter of them still carried his age well, being a nonagenarian, though I cannot say why we had never exchanged pleasantries in all the time I had seen them.

Comforting the Bereaved

After the Sung Eucharist, I saw other church members go to chat with the one who was present, and it caught my eye that they were shaking his hand and patting his knee. Everything pointed to the premise that something might have happened to his partner, and from these interactions, I had drawn my own conclusions before I enquired of another person.

The old man had passed away during the week, and they were comforting his partner. I had not made his acquaintance well enough to be familiar, yet I felt that we had, even from the distance I maintained, lost a dear member of our community. May his soul rest in peace.

A Summer Barbecue

Our village, which comprises five apartment blocks with shared facilities and a rather cantankerous WhatsApp group of restless people who have not yet found the natural circadian rhythm of silence and peace at a certain time of day, gathered in the communal garden for a summer barbecue.

I was not sure I would attend, as I am not good with crowds, but when my neighbour, one of the organisers, saw me a few hours before the event, I could not excuse myself from the fête. I paid for my ticket and took a bottle of South African shiraz and a bottle of orange juice to the gathering.

Gathering in the Garden

Dressed in traditional and colourful apparel, I was easily the centre of attention, while at the same time hoping to be inconspicuous. This was the first time something like this had been arranged in our decades-long residency of the village, and over forty people came.

From someone who had moved in only a fortnight ago to others who have lived here for over thirty years, I gleaned enough from the conversations I had. I was better off sitting in one place, with people interacting with me, than moving around networking extrovertly, which is a total drain on my mental reserves.

Proximity Without Intimacy

It struck me then how strange it was that so many of us should live so close and yet know one another so little. That WhatsApp group is the perfect emblem of it; we are near enough to disturb each other's peace, yet not close enough to know the names behind the complaints.

We had shared walls, stairwells, and a garden for years, and it took a barbecue for some of us to exchange a first word. Proximity, I realised, is not the same as intimacy, and living side by side is not the same as living together.

What Community Means

What it revealed to me was that we do not do neighbourliness and community enough, at least for those with an interest in others. I once had a neighbour whom I never met and who kept to themselves in the eighteen months they lived next door. Whether a recluse or simply indifferent, one could only be glad they were gone when I learnt of the situation.

I only want neighbours I can check on and who check on me; people who, when we meet in the corridor, would stop to have a chat; people ready to help one another in the ordinary and the more so. They become a kind of family, and that too is what community is all about.

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Yuletide Pilferer, present

Homecoming Challenges

On my return from Cape Town in early September, I was informed that the keypad on our antiquated door entry system had become sticky. You could not guarantee getting the code in after an umpteenth number of tries before having to go around the back of the building to gain access to the apartment block.

Worse for me was being already pressed by the time I got to the door, promising myself that I only had a few more steps before I wet myself. Many an unfortunate mishap of bladder incontinence occurred as a personal event when you were close enough to home, before the public saw something amiss, without any knowledge of the backstory.

Temporary Solutions

The keypad will not be replaced, as the parts are impossible to reorder. Instead, we have a temporary fix, along with facial recognition entry systems installed at other entry points in the village. Our village consists of six residential apartment blocks.

Meanwhile, new closed-circuit television cameras with motion sensors have been installed in the foyers. There is a possibility that I have become the local Mr Bean, making faces and sticking my tongue out at the camera as it follows my every movement.

I have been tempted to jump around a bit until the mechanism just breaks. It is all recorded, and it is only a matter of time before my well-mannered mannerisms are published as the prankish exuberance of a lovely man.

The Porch Pirate Incident

We also had our own episode of a daring and returning porch pirate tailgating other residents or using subterfuge to gain access to our mailroom and making off with deliveries that could have been Christmas presents.

The resolution quality of the cameras is commendable. He, a well-spoken man with an Irish accent and dressed well enough to blend into the setting of our village community, had the sheer luck of being captured on camera and in the act.

Then the presents in his presence presented an opportunity, but his heretofore free Christmas presents lost him his freedom, as he was marked present before a magistrate and is presently resenting his luck in a police cell.

When you have a pretty face, you had better not resort to petty crime. Whatever other deeds are caught on camera might be shared on the village WhatsApp group that I joined long after everyone had had a good laugh at his expense. I was only a decade late to take my seat at the showing of the Yuletide Pilferer.

Essential Snobbery 101: Leaving the village people in the village

A fear of the imagined

Village People, and this is not the American disco group from the 1970s; rather, it defines a state of mind, the foreboding that any adversity or misfortune is an extension of the negative influence of people from your homestead on your circumstances.

The idea of village people is retrogressive, a concept of people limited by a frame of reference governed by malevolence and envy: detractors who cannot bear to see others succeeding, whose sense of joy is derived from the downfall of others.

Whether the concept of village people is imagined or real, we find ourselves caught in the paranoia of being watched and afraid to stumble. Everything becomes a premonition towards ill. The danger is that we become ensnared by mental constraints we have imposed on ourselves, borne of the irrational yet significantly impactful on our mien.

Leave them in the village

Yet, I aver that village people should be left in the village and not be given any semblance of influence beyond the village limits. They cannot walk where we have walked, nor can they see through our eyes.

Why, then, do we believe that village people have the ability to impact our lives so profoundly that they have such a hold on us? How can they divert not just the course of events far removed from them but also define our destiny? The truth is probably a battle we are engaged with, in our heads rather than something external to us.

To paraphrase Hanlon's razor: "Never ascribe to malice (of village people) that which is adequately explained by incompetence (of ourselves)." If we took more responsibility for some things that have happened to us, the village people might just become the music that gets us on the dancefloor.

At the vicarage of St Jude's Anglican Church

What a child saw

The St Jude’s Anglican Church from whence my ancestry emanates conveys a great sense of community and service, that I witnessed just over a generation ago. My first view of the church was on our return from the UK, I was a precocious boy full of opinions that never failed to find a voice, as I was observed by many who wondered about this little alien utterly different from his peers.

I had a great-grandmother and she probably had many ahead of her in age and status, it was a village that sat on the hopes that grew from the successes of its many sons and daughters educated for professional lives never stinting in their generosity to improve their town. Electrification, piper-borne water, a new church building, improved school buildings, scholarships, and much else came with their desire to lift their humble village.

A church on the lurch

Being of the Anglican faith, I returned there to be confirmed. Everything our parents did was to encourage our love of the village. The big difference is, that they had their childhood there, we only had short breaks, and what represented our innate childhood was elsewhere.

We could not cultivate our parents' childhood memories of their village; maybe if they had shared some of their hair-raising stories, we might have been intrigued and more invested. Alas!

I have for too long overlooked another issue that had surrounded the church; but a seething rage welled up in me when I caught the glimpse of a missive of mendicancy imposed on the mainly influential octogenarian parish members, many of whom have settled into retirement for decades, but the parson is unrelenting.

Vicar on a venal trail

When a parishioner passes on, despite all the dearly departed might have contributed to the town and the church, a venerable preys on the vulnerable with extraneous and outrageous demands. If the stated requirements are not met to his satisfaction, he devotes the homily that is supposed to honour the departed to excoriating and embarrassing the bereaved for not pulling their weight.

It is a merciless abuse of position that reeks with venality and these expressions are at the most charitable end of the scale. The love of money is said to be the root of all evil, to suggest that he personifies the inordinately untenable quest for filthy lucre at the expense of those in need of succour does not begin to describe the circumstances for some of the recently bereaved that I am acquainted with.

How such manifestly disreputable conduct has been allowed to thrive in that church community where the bereaved are left bereft of dignity or respect under the watch of a thriving bishopric and a congregation that seems to condone, tolerate, or just be resigned to these macabre machinations is daunting and baffling.

He has become a potentate, probably untouchable and certainly unaccountable for his excesses. This is not village talk, the reputation is known and has festered with lascivious abandon.

Better is quite expected

I am a steward at the Manchester Cathedral, at the end of last year, we had two funerals of prominent, if not national figures. The organisation of the events was to the highest professional standard, the Prince of Wales was in the congregation; I did not once see any of the bereaved being put upon, we gathered to celebrate the lives of their dearly departed and they received much Christian comfort and consolation.

They would have felt they had done well by their patron and the clergy did not insert themselves into the ceremony in any way, they gave tribute and honour and showed compassion and understanding.

Obviously, it is my hope that there is an improvement in the conduct of the venerable but by his antecedents, I find it impossible to support any fundraising activity he might champion as he has sown seeds of discord and acrimony, the people he besmirched at the funerals of their loved one still hurt from his villainy. They have received neither apology nor appreciation.

Even from England, who would have thought there was a highwayman at the gates of the temple? Yet, like a Pharisee, he brings the adulterous woman to be stoned and tithes the widows, the widowers, and the poor, to the minutest thing while preventing the adherents from the kingdom of heaven.

If anyone might have the thought, they should not remotely be persuaded of it. This is written that it might be on record. The spirit of Pontius Pilate compels me. Thank you.

Essential Snobbery 101: Yet More Compassion Affects

Your Monitoring Causes Anguish

It was with amusement when I was chatting to my friend yesterday that I talked about YMCA, in reference to the malevolent Village People that camp on my social media pages for no particular reason than to seek salacious gossip to feed to others to find some sort of relevance or sense of significance.

Indeed, especially in almost 20 years of blogging and well over a decade on Facebook and Twitter, if it is not already clear that my expression is not as advanced and determined as it would ever be, my hope always is to present an ever-improving clarity in voice, intent, and assertion.

Maybe, in some cases, what I say when reported to some might upset them, but those who know me already know who I am, I am accepted for the person I am, and I have been. I know that learning to love myself is the greatest love of all, and I keep at it.

Your Meddling Cannot Alter

I was over 50 when a distant relation I had not spoken to in over 35 years called out of the blue to upbraid me. You, this boy, have not done this, he intoned. There was a swell of rage and anger in me, but I kept my cool. Apparently, he wanted to humiliate me before shoving a begging bowl before me to send him funds to complete his building.

I have been blessed abundantly to have an open hand to many, and more grace will abound to be able to do more as times change.

What would not happen is people who have no inkling of my life, history, struggles, or victories, thinking they can come around to instruct me to change something about my life because they once had some influence by reason of some old relationship to interfere and exceed their bounds.

Your Meanness Cultivates Atrocity

It is quite irksome, the lack of self-awareness in the first instance, that follows with the inability to mind your own business. Busybodies, on the lurk, unconcerned with the particularities of their own situation but inserting themselves in the lives of others in the quest to dominate.

Those who have absorbed the jot and tittle of everything going on elsewhere, yet all they do is exacerbate tittle-tattle without any iota of humanity or concern to help tackle to some resolution the situation they know too well is, for a season, not going to plan.

They are everything but the Good Samaritan, evil in thought or deed, overly spiritual in apparent prayerful support, without helping to meet any need. Full of faith but bereft of works that make it of any effect. They stand as leafy green fig trees without fruit, awaiting the curse to wither to the root and bear no fruit again. You know yourselves; the Lord forgives you and shows you mercy.

Y'All Moi Conquers Adversity

As for me, much of my amazing life has been lived in the open, my lips filled with testimonies of success, victories, and beauty. What say I? I have no problems with those who have set encampments at the gate; they will see the glorious from afar, and they will be partakers of the blessing, whether they deserve it or not.

The spirit of hope stirs up a well of possibility, and that has happened so many times that I even wonder how things happened and how change has come in ways never anticipated.

I will always have a story to tell, a story of a life that has experiences, adventure, loveliness, excitement, and much more. It has always been my own story, not vicariously living the lives of others, because I have enough to be doing and living, I love my life and the stories I have been blessed to share. Yet More Compassion Affects!

Notes

Village People was a popular American music group that formed in the late 1970s, and one of their most-played hits with a cult following is Y.M.C.A, which has formed the basis of the subheadings in my blog.

Context of Village People from the Urban Dictionary: A person or a group of persons who wish you bad and constantly work towards bringing you misfortune through physical or diabolical means. Usually from your town, but could also be anyone.

My city living as it happens as nothing happens

Me, myself, and I here

Sometimes, I wonder what separates me from Miss Havisham apart from the promise of a wedding that still endures to be fulfilled in due time and having not stopped any of the clocks in my apartment. Much as I would not leave anything to decay in here, my window blinds are rarely pulled up to let in natural light, there has been a fire, but not here, I quite well can exist in the isolated calm of a hermit, not interacting with the outside world for as long as I want.

None of that should read as being an antisocial being, I love the company of people to converse with, probably enjoy dinner or going out, indeed, I do chat to strangers, yet I am anything but an extrovert, I do not have the mental energy for crowds or big parties, I would soon be sat in a corner alone than be found chatting away network and glad-handing.

Ashes and debris

This morning, as I stepped out for my walking exercise, I saw some debris outside one of the blocks in our village, it is a good three blocks away with a cul-de-sac separating us, but we share the same vast subterranean carpark and the communal gym accessed with registered secure processes. It all looked charred as if consumed with fire and I wondered why anyone would set their rubbish on fire outside the block.

Later, some workmen had arrived to shovel away the debris and I was tempted to ask questions, I did not. It wasn’t till later as I stepped out for some shopping that I met my neighbour in the foyer, and she asked if I knew about the fire in that block. Fire? Yes, there was a fire, a huge one at that with flames shooting out of the roof of the block on the top floor of a 6-storey apartment block, with the main roads in the area cordoned off.

Stranger lights in the nights

It so happens, I never stepped out yesterday, at least not from the afternoon of two days before, there was commotion, and 5 fire engines I was told, and no one even reported the incident on our village Facebook page. This was the same block in which just about a year ago, a human and sex trafficking ring was busted. I cannot find any information about the fire in our city newspaper, like it has been hushed up.

Then I was told there was another fire across the street a few weeks ago that I should have been able to observe from the windows of my side of the apartment complex. There was? I did not ask when exactly, as it might have coincided with when I was away, but I knew nothing of it. It would suggest I am probably not the best candidate for curtain twitching or the Neighbourhood Watch. Much as some might attest to be powers of observation, I have not applied them with any distinction to my immediate environment.

As it happens as nothing happens

Once again, I have been lulled into the apparently deceptive uneventfulness of genteel city living where nothing of note happens and that gives cover to many things you would never imagine happening around here. For a serial sex offender lived nearby, as was the sex trafficking ring, and the Manchester bomber of May 2017 was on the outer side of our village apartment block complex.

Blog - City living in the deception of the genteel

Do I need to get on a nosey parker introductory course or is my penchant for presumably minding my own business in a very English way getting in the way of basic curiosity and awareness? That is something to think about. I might need to start with pulling up my Venetian blinds and I doubt I am ready for that radical change in living arrangements.

The village girl is a sex doll

When they decide for you

The village girl made an appearance again in the documentary of the continuant present, beautiful, naïve and unsophisticated, homely, nubile and fertile, presumably pliant and like clay ready to be moulded and sculpted to the desired image or idol that worships you.

The village girl is vehicle of low expectations offered in the failing of decisions you were expected to make that you did not. The assumption that you are lacking in both capacity and audacity, an eye is out there having decided on your behalf that this would work for you.

They got you sex doll

The village girl is an intrusion an expanse of denial of choices you have already made. In some cases, they will enquire of you but are never satisfied by how you respond. Your sexuality being an issue you may not be at liberty to discuss, for it is expected that a heteronormative expression is the only game in town.

The village girl is a doll, plastic to the feel and dressed as you will. Mute that she cannot talk back, though they forget that she is also deaf that she cannot hear. There is nothing sensory in her adoption than to fulfil a predilection. They seek a grandchild, and any would do, you just need to play with the doll and let nature do the rest.

A wife never by your side

The village girl is a slave, a non-person without autonomy or ambition, the calling is to serve and deign eternal gratitude for being rescued from no expectations to great expectations. Rarely do you hear of her for her mission is defined and non-negotiable. Her lot is sealed in the contract that will eventually invite abuse for the union was imposed to satisfy a whim.

The village girl is behind the veil, a woman in purdah that you can’t afford to show. The distance to be bridged in that relationship is probably too great, it would take more than many are willing to give to grow into companionship for display. As you grew up in radically different environments there is no guarantee that things would work out. They do not care for those intricate issues; the fulfilment is in issue and the troubles you must resolve yourselves.

Used and abused for others

The village girl belongs elsewhere where she can be fulfilled in the things she understands. Indeed, her horizons can be broadened, and so should she have prospects, but not at the behest of others interfering in your life to fulfil dreams they have of you at the expense of the destiny of another co-opted into a Machiavellian ploy.

The village girl will leave the village, the village of your grasp, the village of your pact, the village of the grand plan and the village of subservience, when she does, she will go to the city and in that city, even the village of your mind will not survive. I plea, stop sacrificing village girls to machinations of getting your sons into engagements and marriages, they never wanted, ever.

Thought Picnic: The global village is like jetting off to the next hut

The distances in the village

The morbid reality discussed in the former blog, is not just restricted to the many Nigerians or the Africans that have gone to far-flung destinations; it affects the many who have moved away from home to make their lives in other town or cities, countries or continents.

Thankfully, we have not yet colonised space, that would have factored in the equation and there is no telling what the postcodes for the moon or other planets will be.

We are constantly reminded that we live in global village, because of the ease of travel first and now the ease of communication. This also means that the village huts are not as close together anymore; the village chief is probably the UN Secretary General, but he does not wield as much power as the old village chief, whose wisdom and counsel made for peace in the community.

Comfort zones lost

Easy things of simple living and dying have been jettisoned by globalisation. If the means exists, we can circumnavigate the world in just over a day and have learnt nothing but the thrill.

Yet, we must learn new habits, make adjustments and accommodations for difference and diversity, understand strange cultures, and appreciate nuance and subtlety as we try to carry these from the vernacular and the village to the lowest common denominator of global communication - English.

Each language has a richness, even English. We are usually advised to write for the broader audience, simple short sentences which are fine, but we end up losing versatility and depth if we live on milk alone when we should have moved on to meat. There is the milk is for babies element to expression and there is meat for deeper engagement.

Between us and apart from them

Context, tone, intent, delivery and meaning can be rudimentary or complex, the English when being English have mastered the understatement, a Shibboleth that only the schooled or reared would understand as those who speak it as another language will be completely oblivious.

Ridiculous as English jokes might sound to very many, we laugh if and when we get it, the division made more stark because English in the United Kingdom is many cases quite different from that spoken, written and understood in word usage, context, tone and meaning from that spoken in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where it is natively spoken before you consider other countries where it is the official language.

I wondered how to end this blog and then decided, it best ends this way to be continued along another line of thought.

A road runs through it

A birthday song

I called my father yesterday morning to wish him a happy 69^th birthday and regretted the fact that I had not followed a musical career whereby I would have been able to sing a birthday song.

He humoured me by asking me to sing anyhow; whilst I do remember being a chorister many years ago and do have a baritone kind of singing voice, having never developed or practised the art, it could well be frogs croaking down the phone.

He was just getting prepared for church as it was harvest Sunday and he happened to be one of the convenors of the harvest.

At our adopted hometown, my father’s status derives from his selfless community work going back over 40 years rather than the ephemeral and gaudy show of wealth – time and again, he has been honoured for his service and I am greatly proud of him.

The road through

Talk then got to the matter of the building of a dual-carriage way which is to run through the centre of the village, this plan has been in the books for decades, it now appears it is coming to fruition.

I wondered about how a major road might affect the dynamic of our village, the paternal part of my family hails from the north of the road, the maternal part from the south, the cemetery and market are on the north, I would suppose the king’s palace is in the south.

One thing they did to reduce pedestrian traffic crossing what would be a busy road was to sink another borehole in the northern part of the village but I was not satisfied with that arrangement.

Bridges of safety

I felt that planning should have included at least one pedestrian bridge but my father said after speaking to the contractor what I considered a critical safety feature was not in the planning nor was it budgeted for.

I suppose that leeway accounting for safety had been consumed in the kickbacks that smoothed the allocation of the project to the winner of the contract.

I then recounted to my dad one occasion where I could not be bothered to do a 1.5-kilometre walk when it could be done by crossing an expressway and save me 1.1 kilometres under the Isolo Bridge on the Apapa-Oshodi expressway.

I heard a lot of shouting and warning sounds none of which I thought pertained to my crossing, I was blind-sided and oblivious to the fact that a car doing about 120 kilometres an hour was about to whiz past me and I was inches away from being splattered across the road like minced meat.

You could hear my father sigh and whisper a prayer, it brought home the point I was trying to make without going down the extreme of how if a burial were to take place in the north of the village from residents in the south.

The safety deficit in development

As I pressed home that point of the criticality of safety, especially when the road was still being built, my father interjected with the comment that it would not been considered and finished with the comment – Omo Oyinbo – (meaning white boy.)

It was not so much a derogatory statement as an acknowledgement of the difference of thinking we have always had for a long time, when many years ago he opined that I have always thought like a Westerner and more recently that I was never good at sport by a very good conversationalist.

On a more serious note it highlighted the trade-offs people were willing to make for development in developing countries; the implementation of grand projects without the considerations for adaptation, integration and safety for the persons the projects are to serve.

A big road would eventually run through my village, splitting it in half and maybe we should be the first to put speed bumps or traffic calming devices on a dual carriageway to slow drivers down for the sake of keeping the village folk from unnecessary sorrow.