Things That Go Bump In The Night

At home in New Zealand, I always thought I was quite good at sleeping. I would sleep 9 hours most nights, often more, and most days that I wasn't working I would nap for at least an hour in the afternoon. What I never realised though was how quiet our neighbourhood is. Sure, cars would drive by and sometimes you could hear sounds from the highway on the other side of the river. Inside the house the TV might be on or Sam might be talking in his sleep and banging on the wall, but that was about it. On the whole, there wasn't a whole lot of noise.

Not so in Africa.

My first couple of nights here I found the noise overwhelming. There were babies crying, dogs barking and people talking at all hours of the day and night. Roosters crowed in the morning, there was a mosque nearby with regular chanting and the dala dala (a van used as public transportation) going backwards and forwards on the road out front.

After we moved to the new volunteer house, which is in a more affluent area (funny the difference a five minute walk around the corner can make!), we found there was not nearly so much "everyday living" kind of noise that you heard at the old place. The first night here though I was awakened in the middle of the night by what sounded like a pack of ravenous dogs barking right outside. They would run back and forth and growl and howl and make a terrible noise. I have since become used to it! Our night guard, Emanuel, also walks around on the gravel outside and opens and closes the gate (he goes back to Neema House to get coffee during the night). It was a bit alarming to wake and hear footsteps outside the window in the night until I realised it was just the guard!

Then the night before last, Shermaine and I had just gotten into bed and turned the lights off when there was a noise and then we could hear Lori calling out, "Heelllooo? Heelllooo?"I thought she must have opened the door and be talking to the guard or something and then we heard, "Did anyone enter? Helllooo? Hannah?"At that I was out of bed thinking that something was wrong! It turned out that when I shut the bedroom door a couple minutes earlier, I had slammed it and Lori and Lita thought that it was the front door opening and shutting and that a stranger might be in the house. Thankfully it was just me!

Later in the night I woke up to hear a clicking sound outside. It had awakened Shermaine too and it was so loud and persistent that we got up and walked around the house. We shone a torch out all the windows, but the noise seemed to be coming from all directions at once. It was too mechanical and regular to be an animal and when we talked to the others in the morning we found that it had woken all of us, but nobody seemed to know what it was. Yet another strange and unidentified noise!

We have also been awoken early in the morning by what Shermaine politely called "lively African music." Lively is one way to put it! We wondered where it was coming from until we realised that it was probably just Emanuel playing music from his radio.

As I write this, it's just after 9pm and I can hear crickets buzzing, the pack of dogs (they seem to make themselves scarce in the day as I've never seen more than one stray dog at a time), plus a party which is going on across the street. And yet in a few minutes time I will go to bed and sleep like a baby. By the time I get home I will probably find sleeping in near silence bewildering!

I'm sure there will be many more strange night noises to hear here. Just another part of experiencing Africa I suppose!

xoxo,
-Hannah