The Gardening Competition
I honestly don’t know any school apart from Motown that has room on their calendar for an inter-house gardening competition. I mean, honestly, flowers? Oh well. it simply meant more work for us.
As you may remember, the state of water issues in Aggrey House was deplorable, and by extension, floral life was pretty much non-existent. At least, not the kind of pretty flowers and plants you would actually like to see.
All work was supervised by the bellboys. In the beginning, there was Sweet Sugar and Obstinate. Towards the end, we had Jay-Dark, Salageezy, and Atta-Kay.
Honestly, I missed Sweet Sugar and Obstinate.
These slave drivers had us fetching water to pour on the bare soil. Like, yo! You didn’t plant anything. What are you watering?
Every day, after lunch, you could find Aggrey boys moving between Aggrey House and the dining hall in their red shirts, with yellow Kuffuor gallons.
If this sounds like annoying work, you are right, and that is why Obodai and I tried to play smart and dodge the water-fetching.
We were caught.
Manure
“So you people be sly
The question was rhetorical. Only a fool would answer.
We were fools. “Oh, no be so-“.
“SHUT-UP!!” came the reply.
Why was he shouting? Seriously, this guy was always shouting. Didn’t he know how to have a quiet conversation?
“You figure say you be smart aaaama”, he smirked, “rydee see you.”
See us oo. We were kneeling down at A-Court, the corridor leading from the main entrance to the staircase, while Jay Dark looked down on us from the staircase.
“You know your punishment?” he asked.
“Do I look like a psychic to you?” I replied. (In my head).
In case you were wondering, kneeling down is not a punishment. It’s like ‘counter-back’ cells before Nsawam, or hell before the lake of fire… but that’s just by the way.
“You people dey come ‘
That didn’t sound good.
“From here, the two of you go fetch twenty buckets of manure — EACH — from the piggery to the lawns.”
Ah, wait, did this guy just say we were going to carry pig poop?
Surprise surprise, Motown has a piggery. They actually raise pigs in that school… and you’d be surprised just how much poop they generate.
But seriously, twenty buckets of pig poop?! Obodai tried to object, but just then Eben, the house prefect, passed by, so his words got stuck in his throat. He would much rather take his chances with the pigs than junior Hitler.
I should probably spare you the details of how we used pieces of plywood to shove the poop into condemned buckets, and how the flies followed us as we carried the dense heavy poop from the piggery, past not one, not two, but three girls’ houses, and back to Aggrey house. Or how the poop splattered as we dumped it on the lawn, and we had to dodge for dear life to make sure we could still wear our shirts afterwards.
Needless to say, we couldn’t do twenty buckets. You probably have no idea how much pig poop weighs. No friggin’ idea.
The most painful part was when we realized Jay Dark wasn’t even counting. I don’t blame him. Who wants to sit around and count piles of doody?
After the third trip — six buckets each — we grabbed some sticks, spread the poop around, and called it a day.
Five showers later (I’m kidding. We had no water. Did we even shower?) we were in class for prep. We slept throughout. We had literally done a sh*t-load of work and it showed. We were hopelessly worn out.
This was two weeks before the gardening competition.
The Aftermath
I think it’s safe to say our bellboy had a lot of crappy ideas. You can’t dump poop on a lawn and expect flowers to grow all of a sudden. Somehow, he wasn’t perturbed.
After Obodai and me, many more Aggrey form one boys fell prey to the ‘crap trap’.
It wasn’t even funny.
We were carrying crap, shovelling sh*t, piling poop, dumping doody, and the lawns were not getting any prettier. As a matter of fact, the house began to smell. Duh.
Smizzle couldn’t stand it. Due to his height, or lack thereof, he seemed to have to contend a little more directly with the stench as he walked past the lawns.
That’s what’s happens when you’re too down to earth. 
Anyway, he figured the solution was to dilute the crap.
He was wrong.
After picking up our Kuffuor gallons and making a gazillion trips to the dining hall to water the lawns, the scent of pig poop quickly became the scent of wet pig poop.
If you’re ever forced to choose between regular pig poop and wet pig poop, choose regular pig poop.
Wet pig poop is worse. Much worse.
The Competition Day
To every cloud, there is a silver lining. This was our silver lining, weeds managed to grow in place of grass over the next two weeks. Considering that our lawns were full of sand just weeks before, this was actually a step up, believe it or not.
We pulled out the old lawnmower, which hadn’t been used in the two terms I’d been in Motown, and we mowed the weeds evenly. From afar, it created the illusion of a nice bed of grass. At close range, the scent and sight would make your eyes water.
We weren’t going down without a fight though.
On the morning of the competition, we painted our empty flower pots and pulled out our biology textbooks to scientifically label every plant and weed that dared grow in our poop garden, as if we had planted anything on purpose. Looking back, we were as hopeless as Ole’s Manchester United.
Needless to say, we lost the gardening competition.
I can’t say I cared much, but I did learn some valuable lessons.
Firstly, don’t dodge work. Seriously, don’t.
Secondly, with all the agriculture taught in Ghanaian high schools, don’t take pig poop to an NPK 15:15:15 fight.