The Uninteresting Place Joy A. Nwodo

Among the rooms in our small old house, the one at the extreme is a
room I find banal. A room lacking luster, with very small wooden
windows that barely lets light rays in; no one placed value on it. One
Saturday, my mum told me to clean the room for the first time in a
long time. The stench of decay and dry air mixed with dust enveloped
me as I opened the door. A step into the room welcomed me into a trap
of cobwebs. Within two hours, I was done with scrubbing, I made for
the shelves to dust them; carelessly flinging one open, a book fell
from it. It was my mum's misplaced dictionary I had been searching for
long ago. I really needed it for vocabulary building since I lost my
own dictionary. I searched for it everywhere except that room because
I least expected it to be there. (Surprisingly, after the cleaning,
the room appeared neater and more appealing than other rooms in the
house. It wasn’t bad after all. My siblings even preferred it to the
other rooms and frequently made use of it.)

I had this cynical attitude: easily discarding seemingly unpromising
matters. When I was the head of a Christian Union in my high school, I
led with little gusto because attendance was abysmally low. Very few
students turned up during prayer meetings and even...