With a title like this one, you'd think that I'm about to wax poetic about all the raging parties in Seronga... Not so...
When I first arrived in Africa- or what I thought of as “real Africa”- the village of Moleps, my first few nights were… Interesting. The night sounds of an Africa village are an unfortunate symphony of the constant barking, braying, clucking, crowing, bleating, mooing and fornicating of the village animals. It crescendos at the full moon.
On the plane to Africa I had somehow managed to score a pair of earplugs (although how or why I would have needed them on the plane to block any noise out of my ambien and wine induced slumber is anyone’s guess) and then at my host family’s house I was reusing the “one time use only” charming blaze orange foam wonders to a point that lacked any semblance of hygiene to block out not only the sounds of the livestock but also the night sounds coming across the open rafter walls of my house. Luckily my mom sent more.
It was funny to me that I needed earplugs to block out the sounds of all the barnyard animals that wander the villages of Botswana day and night (this is the first time I’ve been to a country where they fence their yards to keep wandering livestock out, rather than in..) when I think back on all the places I’ve slept through noises of all kinds.
I’d slept through tons of movies played full blast, innumerable bandits toilet papering my house through my teen years, one year in the drunken, typically screaming haze that is a girl’s freshman dorm floor at college, 2 years in a house directly above both the Duluth fire station and the police station, (cue the blaring sirens at all hours of the day and night) on a hill in which semi trucks flew down the slippery winter hill throwing their jake brakes and screeching day and night. I slept through the city noise of London, near the Imperial War museum on the eve of an unpopular war and its frequent protests complete with drumming, singing and shouting. I’ve slept on a volcano that had been actively erupting and spent more time than I care to admit sharing a residence with an unruly cockatiel who didn’t completely understand what a sheet over his cage meant. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper.
Over time I have adjusted to sleeping through my new barnyard “neighbors” without the assistance of earplugs. At Scott’s camp I have been able to add lions, elephants and groaning hippos to the menagerie of animal night sounds I have slept through. On any given night anywhere near the water of the delta (of which now that it’s flooding I live within a half a mile of) there are so many frogs chirping and singing it sounds like some sort of crazy windchime. I have to admit on the extremely rare night of silence in my hut I have a rather difficult time falling asleep. Luckily, due to the reinvasion of my house by mice (and perhaps bats are what I hear scampering over my head upon a thin layer of nearly particle board that separates me from the invaders?) this isn’t often a problem. It seems the sounds must be sporadic and loudly disruptive to be my lullaby. Ah, Africa.
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