"Navigating Neighborly Relationship: The Good and the Bad".

Good day, people of Hive! Welcome to my blog. Today's topic is from Hive-Naija, and it’s all about saying something interesting about our neighbourhood—whether it’s good, bad, or manageable. It could be about something we like or dislike about a particular neighbour based on their behavior. So, let’s dive right in!

Today, I’d like to talk about one of my neighbours, someone with whom I share the same compound. This neighbour of mine is a married woman with two beautiful daughters. There’s one thing I like and one thing I dislike about her. On the positive side, she’s kind, jovial, and friendly with people. But on the other side, she’s extremely dirty and can be quite hypocritical. Let me start with her dirty side. This neighbour is so untidy that it used to upset not only me but also my brother and my roommate. She’s often careless about keeping her space clean, yet if you saw her going out, you’d think she was the cleanest person around based on how she dresses. What pains me the most is that, as a married woman, she leaves the front and back of her house in a mess—especially the backyard.

She won’t even sweep it herself, and if she doesn’t feel like doing it, she’ll ask her eldest daughter, who’s just seven, to handle it. Her daughter often disagrees with her, saying it’s not her mess to clean up and that her mum should take care of it herself. This response especially angers my brother, who sometimes scolds her for it. Yet my neighbour would tell my brother not to scold her that she's still too young to understand.If we wait for her to clean up, she just leaves it dirty because she has developed a habit of neglecting her space, expecting that we will eventually sweep it. Either I, my brother, or my roommate end up cleaning the backyard because we don’t want guests that visit our compound to think everyone in the compound lives that way. Sometimes, if we sweep, she’ll thank us, but other times she won’t. That doesn’t bother us, but no matter how much we sweep it, she still messes it up.One day, my brother asked me to clean the backyard because it was messy. Her waste bin had fallen down, spilling the trash inside the waste bin everywhere.

What frustrated me that day was that she saw how her waste bin had fallen down herself when she came outside to fetch water, yet she ignored it and went back inside. I was irritated, not because I can’t clean it, but because it’s disappointing to see a married woman act so irresponsibly. Whenever she sees another person’s backyard untidy, she’ll make bad comments about them, not realising she’s just as bad. Still, I swept and put her trash back into the bin. Later that evening, when she came out to cook, she left an even bigger mess, which made me so angry. If not for her age, I would have confronted her about it, because it’s frustrating to clean up what she can't do only for her to dirty it again.

The second thing is her hypocrisy. This neighbour of mine is very two-faced; she’ll laugh with you, but when she’s with her friends, they gossip about you. Since she’s an Ebira woman, she often speaks in her language, thinking we won’t understand. Only my brother, my roommate, and I know about this side of her. One day, my brother went to buy something from one of her friends, who sells snacks. They didn’t realise he was coming to the shop, and he overheard them discussing us. He waited until they finished before he went to the shop to buy what he wanted to buy, acting as if he hadn’t heard anything. When he got inside, he told us about it, which make me and my roommate angry.

In conclusion, despite the fact that she's a good, kind, and jovial person, her dirtiness and hypocrisy are the two things that really make me dislike her.

This is my for the Hive-naija weekly prompt Edition 69

Thanks for reading❤❤❤❤❤.