Sounds of Africa

 There are many sounds that come to my ears each day that in these three months have become familiar to me.

Each morning around 5 am I here the high-pitched cacophony of these beautiful, iridescent blue birds.  They are not nearly as big as the noise that comes from their pointy, bright orange beaks!  It seems they always precede my alarm clock by about 30 minutes. 

I hear the constant hum of the ceiling fans that bring a comfortable breeze through the house in the mornings, and a thick, humid stirring of air in the afternoon heat.  When the hum arrests during electrical outages, there is a physical discomfort that comes with the silence.  Thankfully, those outages usually last only an hour or so.

Around 8:30 each morning the familiar cry of a lady’s voice begins to come to my conscience mind.  It took several weeks before I understood her to be calling out, “Ice water for sale!”  I finally understood her call one morning as I spotted her walking by the house with a tub of water sachets on her head.

There always seems to be hammering of some sort.  I still don’t know what it is that is being pounded, and I’m sure it’s not coming from the same source each time.  Plus, there is the beating of drums every morning at a local school.

When Isaac is here, it is the grass being ‘mown’ by a machete.  I miss the smell of mown grass by a lawnmower. 

Occasionally I hear sirens, but not often.  And there are always horns honking when going to the market.  It’s not for the purpose of telling people to get out of the way, rather to tell people “I’m here”.  For a taxi driver, he wants potential customers to know he’s available.  For the driver going around the curve in the road it is to announce to oncoming traffic to get into their ‘lane’.  I use that term loosely, as often the vehicles drive 3 or 4 abreast, regardless of how wide the road was intended to be.

When on foot, the most common call falling on my ears is, “Oh broni!”  It is the Fante word for white person, and the little children come running to the side of the road to announce to the neighbors the presence of a white person.  I try to always wave to acknowledge them, and sometimes the very small children want to touch me.  Their eyes get like saucers, and sometimes just before our hands will touch it is too much and they begin crying and run away. 

The cocks crowing, the goats and sheep bleating, the dogs barking – those sounds are a constant throughout the day.

The smells are a totally different subject!