Extreme Restructuring
Restructuring was the farthest thing in my mind when I struck up a conversation with a young lady from Francophone Africa recently.
I had overheard Anne-Sophie speaking in French with someone on the phone. Immediately afterwards to my amazement she made another call to someone else and spoke in English with a familiar accent. I was intrigued and moved closer.
“Ca va ma soeur? (How is it going my sister?). I stretched out my hand.
She grasped my hands.“Ca va mon frere. Et vous? (It is well my brother, and you?).
“Je me portebien. J’etait un peuetonnedevousecouterparlantl’anglais avec une accent Nigerianmaissurementvousn’est pas originairedu Nigeria? ( I am doing well. I was not a little bit surprised to hear you speaking English with a Nigerian accent but surely you are not Nigerian?).
“Non, non mon frere, jesuisCamerounais, maisj’aivecuen le Cameroun avec beaucoup de gens originaire du Nigeriaavant de venirici. Eneffetjecompte beaucoup d’entreeuxcomme des amis. (No, no my brother. I am from Cameroun but I lived with a lot of Nigerians in Cameroun before coming to this country. Infact I count a lot of them as my friends).
She released my hands a wee bit too slowly.A lazy, knowing smile played on my lips as I extrapolated.
“Ah voila. Vousdoitavoireubeacoupd’amitie avec les gars du Nigeriala bas. On dit que les hommes originairedu Nigeria sont des amoureuxformidables. (Ah there you go. You must have struck a lot of friendships with Nigerian guys over there in Cameroun. It is said that Nigerian men are formidable lovers).” It was more of a statement than a question.
Surprised at my audacity, she looked at me critically and quizzingly as if she was seeing me for the first time before smiling and responding in English. “How do you know? Or are you a prophet who has come to remind me of my past?”
I laughed. “No, no I am not. I am a common sinner like you.”
She looked at me again as if she was sizing me up as a potential confidant-in-sin.
“To tell you the truth, my fiance is Nigerian. He is Ibo but he lives in The Cameroons. It was with himI was speaking over the phone just now. I was telling him about my experience with my housemate, that is the woman you overheard me speaking to earlier in French.
Irecalled that she was a bit agitated while making the first call.
“I hope there is no problem”, I volunteered.
“Ah my brother, there is a lot of it. It is very dangerous to live under the same roof with strangers, people whose ways are different from yours. You will never find peace.”
“No my sister, I disagree with you on the last part. Peace does not come from outside. It comes from inside, from within you. Peace is not something the world can give you, it is something you can give to the world.”
“Hmmm, my brother, you don’t know what you are saying. There is no amount of peace you can give to Nurse Claire. The woman is plain wicked, selfish and quarrelsome. By the way my name is Anne-Sophie.”
“Aaahh, I apologize for my forgetfulness. It is a great pleasure meeting you Anne-Sophie. I am Mike, but my friends call me Micky.”
We shook hands again. This time it took even longer for our hands to disengage.
“As I was saying Mike, Nurse Claire is a very wicked, spiteful woman who does not like progress, yet she will not allow others to progress. I cannot continue living with her. No I cannot take it any longer, I must leave. Even if I lose everything I have acquired in life, I must secede from our abode.”
Anne-Sophie became very agitated.
I turned into a pacifier.
“Calm down, calm down Anne-Sophie,” I said, “Tell me what is the problem?”
“It is Dr Murray that I blame. You see we are Nurses, all five of us and you know this neighborhood is very expensive. We all lived very far away in different places and the commute was long.”
“One day Dr Murray, informed us that he had just bought a house nearby. He suggested that each of us could rent a room and then share common facilities like the living room, kitchen, laundry room etc.”
“So all of us, Nurse Claire, Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion, Nurse Celine and myself went to have a look at the house. It was new and tastefully furnished. Each bedroom had its own private toilet and bath. Immediately we saw the house, we all fell in love with it. Everybody wanted to live there more so since the house was within walking distance of the hospital.”
“To make things better, Dr Murray subsidized the rent and demanded only $600.00 from each of us monthly. We were to share the electricity, water, lawn-care, trash-disposal bills.”
“Immediately we moved in, Nurse Claire exploited her closeness to Dr Murray to start acting as if she is above everybody else. She would monopolize the kitchen, monopolize the laundry room,monopolize the living room, monopolize the parking lot. Every little thing that happens in the house, she would go and make a report of it to Dr Murray.
“Yet when the utilities bills come in she would be the last to pay. She tries to intimidate everybody. Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion, Nurse Celine are all intimidated by her in one way or the other. But me, I refuse to be intimidated. I am moving out.”
“Have you communicated your desire to move out to you fellow housemates?” I asked.
“Yes. I have been telling them but they refuse to listen to me.”
“You see, at a stage, Dr Murray became embarrassed and exhausted after mediating constantly between us.”
“He said he was going to sell the house. We pleaded with him because we all feared that the new owner might not be so accommodating. But Dr Murray stuck to his guns. He said the only alternative was for us to buy the house.”
“So we jointly applied for a mortgage loan and bought over the property. The legal agreement was that only 5 persons could live in the house permanently at any one time. So if any one of us wanted say to get married, they would have to rent their room to a new tenant acceptable to the others and vacate the house.”
“My fellow housemates led by Nurse Claire have been using this clause to hold me to ransom. Each time I bring a potential tenant to stay in my room, they would find one excuse or the other to reject the new tenant.”
“They would either claim the tenant is too old, or too young, too religious or too non-religious, is a smoker or is an alcoholic. There is no reason they have not manufactured to prevent me from leaving. Yet the fundamental reason for my wanting to leave, which is Nurse Claire’s domineering and overbearing attitude of trying to monopolize everything they have not addressed.”
“Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion and Nurse Celine instead of mustering the courage to directly affront Nurse Claire and call her to order are busy pandering to her excesses. It is not as if they don’t have their individual grievances.”
“For instance, Nurse Nadine who lives in the basement where the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) equipment is located, is always complaining of noise pollution. She is demanding that she be given a substantial discount on the utilities bill she pays because of the noise she has to endure 24/7. She is threatening to shut off the HVAC one night during the cold winter or hot summer to press home her demands.”
“Everything Nurse Claire says or does, whether reasonable or unreasonable, the others respond with ‘Yes Nurse Claire’. But me I am not like that. I don’t tolerate nonsense. I must fight for my rights. After all we are all equal owners of the house.”
“The most painful aspect is that they ganged up and started spreading wicked rumors and outright lies about me. They said I am giving the house a bad reputation because I receive a lot of male visitors. My brother, is it my fault that God made me to be so beautiful? See, men are always flocking around me. I relate more to men than to my fellow women. Men do not have time for gossiping, jealousy or back-biting as women do.”
“Because I am approachable, men relate well to me. But it does not mean that any man that visits me in my house is my boyfriend or a lover that I give my body to. Even if my male friends were my lovers, is it in my own house that I would be messing up with them? Suppose I am with one of them and another one comes looking for me, will I not lose all of them or acquire a bad reputation among all?”
I was tempted to remind Anne-Sophie that to the contrary, women of easy virtue with very bad reputations, are very popular with men. I wanted to tell her that men always gather around such women to get their own share of the available freebies, but deciding that discretion is always the better part of valor, I held my peace.
“Anne-Sophie, to avoid such misunderstandings, is it not better and safer for you to entertain your male friends far from home or in the common living room, where your housemates can easily see that nothing is going on?”
“Mike, it seems you did not hear or understand what I said earlier. I told you that Nurse Claire monopolizes every common thing including the living room. If I entertain my friends in the living room, she will not grant us privacy. It is then she will come and start making noisy phone calls, changing the TV channel or even trying to speak rudely to me. She will even mobilize Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion, and Nurse Celine to join her in their useless conversations.”
“So, what do you intend to do about it?”
“I intend to pack out of the house. But they will not let me leave. Each time I want to leave, they would say that I cannot go like that and that we are one abode, one united, irrevocable and indissoluble abode. One abode my foot.”
“You mean your legal agreement does not guarantee peaceful segregation, I mean separation? Who drew up such an unfair and drastic agreement that binds all of you together like members of a secret cult bound together by a common blood oath?”I said with genuine surprise.
“Thank you my brother. I suspect that Nurse Claire bribed the lawyer that drew up the agreement. It was our former boss and land lord Dr. Murray that brought his lawyer to draft the agreement.”
“The clause that is injurious to my interest is the one that says that before you bring a tenant or another co-owner, to take your place in the house, that person must be approved by the other housemates.”
“The lawyer who is a white man, and probably unaware of African mentality, did not envisage a situation where the other housemates would gang up to say that they cannot approve whoever you bring.”
“This is the bitter situation I find myself today. Nurse Claire, Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion and Nurse Celine want me to leave just like that so they can take over my room and declare it as an abandoned property.”
“Once I pack out, they would change the locks of the house entrance and do whatever they like to my room.”
“But I insist that I must leave. Look as I speak to you, arrangements for me to acquire another accommodation are already at an advanced stage. Although my new accommodation will not be as modern and as comfortable as my present one, it is a price I intend to pay so that I can live in peace.”
“Nurse Claire, Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion and Nurse Celine say I am a woman of easy virtue as well as a harlot who gives our abode a bad reputation, yet they do not want me to leave peacefully while still retaining my investments in the abode. They say if I leave unilaterally there will be war. They say we are one indissoluble and irrevocable abode. I do not understand it.”
I scratched my head, trying to make sense of it all.
“Anne-Sophie, I do not understand this strange situation myself. But the advice I can give to all of you is to let peace and justice reign. To have peace, there must be give and take.”
“Thank you my brother, but how can one live peacefully with Nurse Claire who is always taking liberties, demanding influence,appropriating common territory and not ready to yield an inch?”
“Nurse Claire behaves as if she is the first resident and care-taker of the house, who will always lord it over the others, forgetting that we all pay the same rent, we equally share the utilities bills and are thus equal co-owners, with no one superior and none inferior.”
“Yes, I see what you mean Anne-Sophie. From my own perspective, peaceful separation should be your very last resort. What I think you all need is restructuring. All of you must restructure the way you relate to one another.”
I continued. “Nurse Claire must restructure her over-bearing and domineering attitude and realize that she has no greater rights to the amenities in the house than any of you. On your part Anne-Sophie, you must restructure your lifestyle and realize that you cannot continue welcoming and entertaining multiple male visitors in the house.”
“Together, all of you must draw up an equitable time-share agreement of the common areas of the house like the living room, laundry room, kitchen and so on, whereby each person has their own time slot for usage of the facilities therein and all must abide by it.”
Anne-Sophie suddenly clasped me in a warm embrace.
“Thank-you Micky, for this wise counsel. Please come home with me and talk some sense into my house mates. Maybe when you speak to them with your imposing and forceful personality, they will listen to you and you can supervise and implement the restructuring.”She clung to me ever-more tightly.
In a fit of righteous indignation, I pushed her away.
“Woman, who appointed me a judge over all of you? My time has not yet come. Go yourself and speak to your flat-mates about restructuring.”
Anne-Sophie was unperturbed. Perhaps something instinctively told her that I would indeed mediate in their home trouble. For she said with full confidence.
“Thank you, Micky. Please note that I will continue to insist vehemently on peaceful separation before my housemates. That way when you suggest restructuring as the ultimate solution, all of us can accept it as a middle-ground solution to the present crisis in the spirit of give and take.”
I suddenly came to the realization that Anne-Sophie was much smarter than myself and perhaps her housemates for that matter had given her credit for.
She continued. “Where did you park your vehicle? Please drive after me. I will lead you to our abode so you can talk some sense into all of us.”
Anne-Sophie got into her vehicle and made to drive off. Strangely I found myself driving after her as she led me to meet Nurse Claire, Nurse Nadine, Nurse Marion, and Nurse Celine for a discussion about of all things imaginable - extreme restructuring.
Anthony Chuka Konwea, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, MNSE, FNIStructE, MNICE.