It's Noisy at Our Junction

It’s noisy at our junction.

We live one house off Garba Jumpa Road, which is a main road in our area of the coast. All bus and most taxi service runs by us going from Bakau to Westfield and back, or Bakau to Serrekunda and back. It always has a truck or bike or cab racing by. They constantly ‘toot’ their horns.

Directly on one side of the compound where our apartment building is located sits an auto garage that bangs metal on metal all day long, It’s like someone is always knocing on our door. There is also the occasional revving of a newly fixed engine. Sometimes they blast music from the car stereos and sometimes they gamble after work in large numbers playing dice and card games while the younger kids play foosball. The gaming is actually kind of cool to watch from the second story overlooking the wall a bit. Right now I hear banging from that side of the flat. And right now…and now. It’s getting so a young man can’t take a decent afternoon nap, but I’m actually starting to getting used to it, maybe I’ll be able to live in New York City after all.

Next door on the other side of the compound is a six shop mini strip mall being built by hand. That is a source of non-stop noise usually banging of some kind. It’s been interesting to watch them building but it is loud, and smelly, as I have mentioned in another post. Now I think they are letting some of the builders live in that compound behind the shop because it has gotten much louder at night recently, music until 1:00 AM or later and yelling and, from what I can gather, the sounds of cat raping.

The mosque calls for prayers at 5:30am and four other times a day. But unlike Morocco they chant for at least twenty minutes each time. And sometimes they come on at other times to do some chanting. We are within earshot of one in particular but sometimes can hear another as well. I’m very used to this now, and since I’m turning Muslim it’s beginning to be a very welcome sound. Allah be praised! I’m not turning Muslim in the traditional sense, but you know; “When in Rome.”

There is a six year old girl with some kind of hyperactive disorder that lives beneath us who screams pretty much all day long. (And as it turns out shares my birthday) She’s cute and calls Carolyn, “Auntie Carolyn.” She’s loud. There’s always an assortment of chatter coming in through the windows. It’s weird because after some of the huge cities I’ve been to in Africa now, Dakar and Casablanca, I find it hard to believe that this is the most densely populated part of Africa, but there certainly is never a quiet moment on the street outside our window.

This Sunday, as I started Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress, right on cue with the first song, a loud barrage of sound descended on the apartment coming from every window. We thought for a minute that the Mosque speakers were on the fritz but soon I started hearing some kind of horn through the madness of feedback and what sounded like a distorted guitar played buy the girl downstairs through blown speakers. It turned out to be the music before a speech of a speaker holding a rally about two blocks away. Soon after the music died down he came on and started yelling about something in a language I don’t speak.

I was reading yesterday, laying on the bed, and I stopped to note that I heard; the guy in the background at the rally day two, the garage was banging away on some piece of metal, the girl had some kind of plastic horn which she was running back and forth using in a not too professional way, and the mosque was calling for prayers. It was noisy.

-BBB