Noise

Tiny villages in Africa, and tiny villages everywhere, are often depicted as the epitome of pastoral peace – animals grazing contentedly, women cooking with their babies asleep on their backs, men skillfully working their fields or building houses. Sure, the scene might be punctuated every now and then with the bright laughter of small children, but most of the sounds in the scene are tranquil ones, the soothing rhythm of daily village life.

The reality is that villages in Tanzania are louder—and to my Western ears, more grating—places than anywhere I have ever been. Somehow they seem even louder than Dar es Salaam! There are no “quiet hours” or noise ordinances, though the default is that things calm down somewhere around midnight and pick back up around 4:30 or 5 am (this does not in any way guarantee that someone will not walk by singing at the top of his lungs, drunk on pombe, that a heated argument won’t break out in the next room, or that a cell phone might ring at 2 or 3 in the morning). Suffice it to say that a peaceful night’s sleep is something of a fiction here, especially for a girl like me who needs 8 or 9 hours each night.

Right now, there are two roosters crowing at the top of their lungs outside my window, a child screaming defiantly at its mother, a woman laughing hysterically outside with the teachers while they cook breakfast, a couple of people shouting obligatory good morning greetings three houses down, and a radio on full-blast in the next room (it has been on at this level since 6 am) broadcasting a Swahili drama that currently involves a heated argument between at least 8 family members all yelling simultaneously, trying to decide how to get a woman in labor to the hospital. I would pray for a commercial break in the program, but the commercials are sponsored by 2 competing soft drink companies (Pepsi & Coke), and 2 competing cell phone companies (Celtel and VodaCom), and all seem bent on message repetition as the best form of outcompeting their rivals, meaning that the same four 30-second ads repeat ad nauseam. Emphasis on the nauseam.

Many Tanzanians I have been around appreciate a level of volume on electronics that feels just one decibel away from eardrum-blowing. Cell phones ring at top volume, as if one might miss a call if the ringing volume were one notch lower. Televisions and radios blare, and many of them blare the same snippets (ads, clips, program theme songs) over and over again – whether because of consumer demand or because of economic and sponsorship concerns, I don’t know. I doubt it would be so annoying if the sound were clear, but a lot of the televisions and radios here are either second-hand or very cheap fabrications from China, which means the speaker quality leaves something to be desired. Poor radio signal coverage and lots of broken or improvised antennas mean that the sound quality suffers even further. In a way, the scratchy, tinny sound of cheap speakers and weak radio signals is somehow atmospheric, the sounds so often portrayed on documentaries of villages in the developing world, but every now and then I dream of setting up an NGO to distribute radios with good speakers and to widen radio signal ranges just to introduce a new standard of listening quality!

Tanzanians have a very effusive and ebullient culture, and by and large seem unperturbed by chaotic or noisy environments. Boisterous shouting is a common feature of the music and raucous laughter a regular feature of conversations, so perhaps the loudness is just a natural outgrowth of this zest for living. But my introverted side sometimes needs a little escape…I remembered last night that I had packed a pair of foam earplugs from my flight over here… while they did not cancel out the cacophony around me, they thankfully dulled it enough for me to sleep a full 7 hours.