Tanza-noise-ia
May 1st, 2009 • ICTR Internship, Personal
Apologies for the bad pun in the title. One of the more noticeable differences between Arusha and life back home is the amount of noise people put up with here, especially at random times of the night and morning.
We live on a street about a 20 minute walk from the city centre, so that probably explains part of the problem, but it also seems that either the locals don’t mind the constant noisy interruptions to their lives, or there is nothing they can do about it.
First, There’s the prayer call, which begins at 5am. It’s pretty loud but often melodic, so usually easy to sleep through. Worse is the habit of local street vendors to use megaphones attached to some sort of tape deck to spruik their products. They set the volume at somewhere past 11, resulting in a garbled, distorted mess of noise broadcast up and down the street. Worst of all is when one of the local radio stations is broadcast over loudspeakers. It always sounds like a combination of crazed speeches and a government propaganda machine – and it feels like the speaker is directly facing at our window. Though it’s all in kiswahili so who knows what they’re saying.
Beyond the abuse from loudspeakers, there is also a range of automotive sounds to put up with too. None of the cars and motor cycles here appear to have mufflers, and drivers also seem to enjoy revving their cars, trucks and transports up and down our road as they try to get up the hill with an overloaded car or truck. The extra weight results in the engine working overtime, producing a massive haze of smoke and noise. The cars also insist on using their horn as their main form of communication. There is one notorious dalla dalla that insists on hooting their horn for about 20 minutes outside our apartment at 7am for no apparent reason.
Finally, the dogs, which sleep throughout the day, roam the streets at night time, creating their own cacophony of barking, growling and fighting. While during the day you wouldn’t think the street was overrun by dogs, judging by the night time sounds there must be a serious over-population of fighting animals here (another reason not to walk the streets at night).
Even with all of the above, though, it’s been a while since I’ve been woken up by noise during the night. A combination of late nights, early mornings and long walks to work appears to have made me slightly more impervious to sleep disturbances – plus consumption of the bastardised ‘gin’ known as Konyagi has been known to help in this regard too.
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One Response (Add Your Comment)
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Trevor May 2, 2009at 8:14 pm
HI Dev
This is an amazingly beautiful, sustained piece of description. It is much like a passage from Steinbeck, one of my favourite authors, whose descriptions are legendary. You must have been “inspired” in a higher sense, to write this magnificent text.
Love,
Dad