So I am, by unfortunate nature, a bit compulsive about organization. I have mentioned before in this column that I live by the cardinal rule that everything has its place and every place has its thing. Not only is this beneficial to me in my personal and work life, but it is also beneficial to those around me that are surrounded by my things.

After having moved out of our sprawling house, we have now become rebound renters; which is sort of funny, if you really take the time to think about it. In any case our exhausting move has brought out 23 years of accumulated Abesha lifestyle, and you know what that means? No more organization and no more every place having its own things and every thing having its own place. More than the physical exhaustion of having to move all that stuff; there is the mental pain of knowing that you really do not have a clue where the things that you are familiar with are going to make their new homes.

As time progresses, you become more and more familiar with a new space or a new room. There are more options that open up to you, so of course, it being natural that everything evolves, things find their places and the places find their things and all is well that ends well.

But that is not the thing that got me to writing this piece this week. Part of moving into a new space is assigning sleeping spaces for everyone that resides in the house, from the help to the mistress of the house. Now everyone has a space in the main house although I am having a bit of a humanitarian crises when it comes to where our guard is going to sleep.

The house that we rented has a metal tree house style structure that is suspended over the back fence. You have to use a detachable ladder to reach it, and it is about 1.5m by one metre. The thing has no bottom, and windows have been cut into it. It is of course made of all metal, so imagine the temperatures up there.

Now I have adamantly refused that our guard, who incidentally is the namesake of our Prime Minister, and happens to be one of the happiest people I have ever met in my life, will sleep out there. I have gone as far as to suggest that the feudal levels of grain that are in the house should be shipped of to my grandparents house for storage so that our Meles could have a room of his own that does not have the risk of toppling over when an adult attempts to mount the extremely narrow and life threatening ladder.

Whatever the case, we will find a solution to the problem and I will guarantee that it will not involve that very yellow tree house. But that is not the point. Imagine a family that is not as attached to their Meles as we are to ours, they would probably let him sleep up there. And that is not even the point I mean the people that constructed the home in the first place should have given due consideration to the Abesha lifestyle and thought of where to put the Meles’s of the world before putting a child size tree house on the back fence if you get my drift.

But this is something that is accepted throughout our society. It is one thing to have house help, but an utterly different story to allow human beings that breathe the same air and drink the same water to live in degraded conditions. I am sure as you are riding home late from wherever; you have noticed the makeshift sleeping cells that are dragged in front of stores for the overnight guards. There are some institutions that offer only standing room despite demanding 14 and 15 hours of guarding,

I mean fine, I may be sounding a bit like Marie-Antoinette who suggested cake for those who could not get their hands on bread, but I will be the first to tell you that the more comfortable and familiar you make the staff in your home, the more likely they are to treat your home as if it were their own. I have seen it work time and time again.

What I have also seen time and time again is the fact that people assume because their money can afford to buy them the help that it has also afforded them the person. I beg to differ, and perhaps if we were more conscious of that, the yellow tree houses would not exist.