The acute accommodation problem at Legon has led to a phenomenon referred to as perching. In this, a student who gets accommodation allows a friend (who is also a student) to share his bunk with him (usually, it’s male students who do this). Such a student is called a ‘percher’.
There are also extreme cases in which a student, with the consent of members of a room, sleeps on a mattress in the center of the room. That student gets to be the last to sleep and the first to wake up since members of the room have to use the floor space in which he will spread his mattress. This is especially hard for him because students sleep late. There is much disturbance even at 1am. And by 5 am, things start getting busy again!
It took me quite some time to get used to perching! Imagine sleeping on a bunk which was about a 1m to 1.3 m in width with another person. Our hot weather and the fact that the room was poorly ventilated didn’t make matters any better! Students who live in the annexes have better ventilated rooms as a result of the design and positions of their blocks. You could feel the body heat generated by your bed mate and his movements while sleeping. And you have to turn carefully. Every time you turned, you stayed in the same hot position you were in. I’m not exaggerating, these things are true! I admit they are contrary to what I expected of a university, especially the first university in Ghana. Many students from all over the country come here with high notions of Legon only to come and realize that things are not quite as they expected.
And there are other kinds of ‘perchers’. Some people just get a friend to keep their belongings with and then sleep in the TV rooms of the various halls. Some also sleep with their books in the reading rooms.
