Good walls make good neighbours

When we arrived back at our house in Kaduna, it was after dark. As I walked through the gate into our compound, I noticed something was different. I stared at the row of doors and windows to my right. Were they always there? Had I walked through the wrong gate? Had someone built a row of houses onto the compound wall and cut through to make windows for themselves?

After a few moments of staring, I realised that actually, our wall was no more, and that these were the back doors to the houses in the next compound (only a foot or so away from where our wall used to be).

It’s funny: it’s almost impossible to gossip with Nigerian friends, because the events which I consider dramatic and for which I expect an exciting backstory are just seen as matter of fact here. Me: “Woah! The wall’s gone! What happened?!” Neighbour: “It fell down.” End of conversation.

So now we have new neighbours. This has several implications. Firstly, there is less to keep the kids from those houses from coming over to play with Ifeanyi and Ebele (our landlord’s children) and following them into our house. It’s taken months to train those two to knock before they enter, only to touch their toys and not our computers, to ask before eating or drinking something (cut away to unfortunate incident of child very nearly taking a gulp from my gin and bitter lemon). These newbies are far more unruly, and have among them Joseph – the boy who, in our first few weeks, lied to us about it being his birthday so that we bought him a present, and about whom it is written in chalk on their compound gate “Joseph is a bad boy. Joseph is a bad boy. Joseph is a bad boy.”

Secondly, one of these households owns a dog which can now freely roam into our courtyard. I don’t think it bites or is dangerous, but I’m slightly wary since it’s first appearance led to a hoard of screaming children running terrified into our house. We generally have our door open during the day, and every time I go to do the washing up I expect to come back and find it in our living room.

On the up side, there’s more light coming in through our front window and when we sit outside we’re not staring at a concrete wall any more. But it does mean that I feel slightly more self conscious about sitting on our porch in a strappy top and shorts, and – I’m afraid this may say something about the difference between my culture and that of Nigerians – I think I preferred sitting and looking at a grey wall than having other people being able to see me from their kitchen sink.