Who is my neighbour? This was a question asked by a certain Pharisee in the Bible and the answer he got was powerful but while we should see everyone around us as our neighbours, some people just behave in ways that make one blow their top in anger.
According to what I was told as a child, a neighbour is a person who lives beside you, what we call next door neighbour. I have encountered neighbours that I can only describe as sent from heaven. Their demeanour is so pleasant, that I always want to be with them. I literally shed tears when they were moving out of the compound to a new place. The relationship was that good.
I recall a particular family that moved into the compound where I reside. They were a family of four and they were really nice. In terms of cooperation, they cooperated well. They lived in the compound for almost four years and neither quarrelled with anyone. We lived like one big family and shared things together. There was no beefing whatsoever. During Christmas and Easter, I am usually very happy because there will be much food available. There were two other tenants with us but those ones only came back during the weekends as they work quite far away.
The compound was left to just that family and mine to manage and we did so very well. When there was no power supply, the father would help us out by putting on his generator, without asking for fuel money. Most times when I tried to give him money for fuel, he would collect it and gift it back to my daughter. Sunday was movie time as they would ask us to come in and watch movies with them and this was usually followed with small chops, chin chin and Coca-Cola. I could go on and on in narrating all the good qualities of this particular neighbour. Their good qualities far outweighed any bad character that I might have noticed.That's my experience with a good neighbour.
Then there's another experience with a bad neighbour. This neighbour also happens to be a teacher, he is married but his wife lives in another state and only comes back during the holidays. I thought that as a teacher we would share same field interest and we might have a good rapport but that was only a temporary fix. I discovered that he (let me call him Isaac for this post), was an expert gossip. He would gossip and act like he did not say something and then he would move camp to the other person and relay a one-sided version of the gossip to the person. By doing so, he created rifts between two people in the compound.
Not only is he a seasoned gossip, he is also a narcissist. He feels so on top of the world that every other person's opinion becomes worthless to him. This guy is also very argumentative. He can argue for Africa. He argues about everything and anything from religion to sports, politics, and more. He will never concede defeat instead he will twist the facts to find a loophole and keep the arguments going. At first, I used to indulge him but after much observations I stopped any argumentative discussions with him.
He rarely cooperates with the rest of us as he prefers doing his own thing. Last December,, some tenants came up with the idea of having a get together on new year's day. When I heard about the idea, I was pleased with it and so I showed interest and joined the planning but Mr Isaac refused to participate and he even went as far as spreading lies that we were trying to host a street party. The landlord had to tell us to abort our plans and we did not hold the get together anymore. His bad disposition far outweighs the little good qualities he might possess and for sanity sake, most of the tenants avoid him.
Some neighbours are great people while some are monsters in human clothing.
Thank you all for reading.
Images used are mine.