This past Sunday Joy FM was broadcasting a special Sunday edition: an hour-long show at 6 p.m. recapping stories accumulated from the past week. Part of the show contained an interview featuring yours truly in which I was asked about my experience at the Ghana Football Association press conference last Wednesday. I had full intentions of listening to this interview.

Instead, I got a rather “special surprise” instead. As my house mates and I left for afternoon shopping and an early dinner, I proceeded to lock my bedroom door as I normally do. However upon locking the door, something bizarre happened. The metal lock itself was pushed into the keyhole shaped crevice in the door and was so far back that I couldn’t reach the lock. My roommates and I, after raging war on the entryway for two weeks, had finally lost the most important battle of all.

When we returned from our trip, we tried pulling out every tactic to regain entry to our room. We did everything from deconstructing the door handle to stabbing the eye hole with all sorts of household appliances. Desperation set in as dusk threatened to fall before we solved the puzzle. We had work  bright and early this morning so gaining access to sleep and appliances ASAP was crucial.

We began looking for ways to climb through one of our two bedroom windows. That didn’t work. We borrowed a large wooden ladder from our next door neighbors. That didn’t work. We attempted to use rusted scaffolding to boast ourselves up.  That didn’t work. I contemplated using either the random pipes lying around the house or the iron bars that lay over the gutter streams in our front yard. Those ideas obviously weren’t going to work.

The aid of the complex’s security guards even seemed futile. Neither climbing the roof nor battering the bedroom door seemed to work. The guards had to eventually phone in a carpenter to rip his way through the door before we could finally enter after an hour and a half of persistence.

This equated to being a special Sunday edition of how to live in Ghana.