I was posted to the Nigerian Law school, Kano campus last year.
Now, Kano is a town far from where I live, quite far and a lot of history and stories surrounds it: stories of insurgency and religious unrest. You can imagine my shock when I was posted to Kano.
All my life, I've been so used to being close to home, which is at the South and I knew that going to the North for studies was going to be a different experience for me.
I had mixed feelings of excitement, curiousity and nearly...well, fright.
Setting out to go to Law School was a new dawn in my life, and I prepared as I could both physically and mentally for the huge encounters I was to make.
Well, I guess nothing prepared me for the room I was going to be staying in for nearly a year.
Wait for it.
I was going to be staying in a room of 10 girls! saywhat.jpg
Now, I had been so used to staying with just a roommate and being very introverted, it was a major challenge to be living with nine different characters for several months.
My Country, Nigeria was very well represented in my room. I mean there were Igbos, Yorubas, one from Delta, another from Bayelsa, Christians and a Muslim. We were a handful and I was confronted with a challenge of having to deal with a crowd everyday.
So, here I was in a strange land with new characters from all works of life and tribes.
Though the highest persons I had to deal with in a room were three, I wasn't so bankrupt in knowledge as to the differences in humans and the maturity in accepting and understanding them.
Remember temperaments?
There's so much beauty in the tempermants of individuals!
There in my room of Ten were Sanguines, Melancolies, Cholerics and Phlegmatics, I had their attributes like the lines on my palms and all I had to do was observe, listen and act.
Thank God for knowledge gotten from books!
John Saul has this to say about how different we are and and I concur
"All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives."
You see, we are different and I will say it again and again, that's the beauty of it.
With the knowledge gotten from books, articles and materials, I was able to read the temperaments of my roommates successfully and while I'm not an expert at Psychology and I may not be so great at analyzing deeper details of human behavior, to an extent I made inferences and viable conclusions that helped me get along quite fine.
So how was I able to deal with the Melancholics, Sanguines, Phlegmatics and Cholerics, ?!
The Melancholics are organized in thought and pattern, emotional and very sensitive, so how do you relate with them?
Laugh a lot: They are serious persons, they'd enjoy humour.
Respect their privacy: They are protective and sensitive.
Compliment and encourage them: They're hardest on themselves, a little encouragememt will do them a lot of good.
The Cholerics: They're bossy, authoritative, born-leaders and outspoken.
Listen to them:These ones are bossy ones , and they like to feel in charge.
Sangunie: They are extroverts, happy beings, the life of the party, emotional and temperamental.
Please laugh with them: They love a good time.
Try to be interesting: They love a good time, again.
Don't take them too serious: they joke a lot. It would foolhardy to take their every word serious.
Phlegmatic: They're slow, they're introverts and naturally peaceful persons.
Take it easy on them: They are slow in getting things done.
Don't take them for granted, they're nice to a fault.
The snippets of advise above is not a guide to make you step on eggs while dealing with people , but a guide for strength and to be in charge in interacting and communicating with any of them.
It's still a journey to deal with these roommates of mine but knowing why they act they way they do is so much of an edge on my side as I don't pick offences easily, I forgive easily and laugh a lot because understanding human temperaments is the key to being emotioanlly intelligent.
It is because we are different that is why the world is beautiful, the variety in our characters and behaviors is the spice on earth. So, understanding why people act they way they do is a key to living rightly with them.
These are lessons from my 'Ten man room'!