I love game nights. The screaming, the manipulation, the drinks, the food, the laughing at each other.
I’ve wrangled a few game nights out of my friends at work.
But I’m not a person who hosts game nights. I’m a person who makes excuses when people want to come over, because I live in a single room with a rice cooker and a big ass roach who takes his divine duty to populate the earth very seriously.
The first time I seriously looked for a place to rent I failed so hard I had to move back home. 2019 if I remember correctly, which i probably don’t.
Anyway, there was endless scrolling on Jiji & Meqasa, and so many hail mary calls with unhelpful agents. I saw a single room with a toilet in the “dinning area”, a compound house in the middle of nowhere, and what can only be described as a bunker. The closest I got was a woman in Spintex who had come around to a 6-month advance, but with an incredibly naive – read stupid – total of GHS1500 in savings I still couldn’t afford it. On the glass half full side, I heard about the horrors of Spintex traffic enough to stomach the L.
So I went back home and only moved out when I could move into Pent for school.
I’m no longer at Pent of course. I live in what started out as a hostel for students and is now an apartment complex, unless students these days are 50 year old men with several children.
I’m 67% sure my room has mold, and I have to carry buckets of water up and down the stairs. Still, I’ve stayed put for almost 4 years because:
- I get to pay rent only every 4 months
- My expensive coping mechanisms means I don’t have a lot in savings
- If I smile wide enough my landlord let’s it slide that others in the hostel now have to pay at least 1 year worth of rent
- It’s close to work
Still, every couple of months I’m ceased with a need to find a new place with zero bugs and I rope my friends into calling agents and scouring TikTok. Last time, my friends Nas & Kathy sent me a combined 20 something TikToks of “single room self-contained”, my friend Francis drove around Dansoman asking agents for leads and was “eyed” for free because he was asking for a place that takes monthly rent, and I tried to blackmail my friend Jonathan into asking his landlady for leads because he lucked out when someone from his church linked him to an expat who wanted a monthly rent arrangement.
Is the price I have to pay for affordable rent sitting through sermons on “How to Please the Guy in the Sky”? Let me tell me you something, my rent went up yet again and my last payment cycle wiped me clean out. You know that level of scrounging that makes you evaluate your life choices and seriously consider fraud?
Yeah take me to church chale. *as Micheal Scott* I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY .
Written by Mayfair Maclean as personal essay. The author is a Slytherin and a copywriter. Check out Mayfair’s portfolio.
