Sounds at Chez Miller

I’ve told Jim that my biggest lasting impression of our house here in Mukono may be the sounds. This is a noisy place. For this week’s post I thought I’d paste in visuals to represent some of the most notable noises here at the top of the UCU campus. (It may be weird to post visuals about sounds, but I wasn’t sure how well I could catch the audio.)

Hornbill window slamming. These hornbills slam their beaks against the mirrored windows on our front door at least once a week. The first few times I leaped up and ran to see who was knocking.

Red-tailed monkey roof thumping, tree swishing, and chirping. I’ve written before about the troupe of several dozen adult, adolescent, and baby red-tailed monkeys. They make loud “thumps” on our roof as they drop from the trees at the back and “swish” as they leap off the porch overhang onto the small tree in front. The young ones make chirping, almost bird-like, sounds. Here Joanna beckons to one through the patio door.

Calls of gray-cheeked mangabees. These bigger, baboon-like monkeys also jump onto the roof and down to the tree. Their vocalizations are closer to stereotypical ape-like calls. We were watching one today calling from a tree branch; his whole back shook as his voice reached a crescendo. Think Tarzan.

Loud all-night disco down the hill and loud all-night prayer meetings up the hill. Most nights it's hard to sleep at our house. Somehow the acoustics of the hill we live on allow the loud music from "Satellite Beach" disco and bar in Mukono town to roll up in force from about 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. That's five or six nights a week. Many aspects of this are confusing to me. Do the patrons not have jobs? If they don't have jobs, how do they pay for their drinks and/or cover charge every night? Why doesn't the town rise up and force them to confine the wee hours stuff to weekends? I've asked several people but nobody has a clear answer. One would-be informant, grasping at straws, suggested that after Idi Amin was ousted people were so relieved to be able to be safe outside again they overcompensated. Amin was deposed almost 40 years ago, so I'm not going with that one. In addition, about two nights a week the preaching and drumbeats from all night prayer meetings on "Prayer Mountain" rolls down from the other direction. I appreciate their zeal for the Lord, I just wish it was a little quieter. (Photo from Satellite Beach website.)

Rain. When it rains all night we don’t hear either the disco or the church, but the gentle drumming on the metal roof of our house. In Uganda there are two rainy seasons. One, from around November to December, is the short rains. The long rains, from late February or early March through mid-May, are petering out as I write this. Incidentally here rain, not sunshine, is a sign of blessing on an event. When we had a celebration for our twins' adoption in Kenya some years back, there was a brief unseasonable sprinkle. People said God was blessing the occasion. Living in east Africa has shifted my views on Jesus's comment that "the rain falls on both the just and the unjust." I used to think that meant even good people have bad things happen to them. Now I think that He was rather saying that God graciously blesses both the just and the unjust out of his boundless mercy. 

“oooakakakaka woo woo” of the great blue turacos. They are beautiful. Somehow, too, when they run up the branches overhead they look like the giant bird Kevin in “Up.” I haven’t been able to get close enough to get a photo. This is from rwandasafari.com.

And many more sounds. The gravel driveway crunching at 5:50 a.m. on weekdays when Luke and Joanna head out to school in Kampala; the cat crying to get in at the door even earlier (I promise we never feed it); the guard dogs at the neighbors’ houses barking; human campus guards and gardeners passing by on their rounds conversing in English or Luganda; the pigs a few doors down (fortunately the smell almost never wafts this way); another, larger species of hornbill quarreling, “waaak waaaak waaaak,” from overhead; the humming of thousands of flies that meets your ear the moment you open the front door on these moist, post-rainy season days; and many other bird and cricket calls chirps, and songs. 

Much as I will be glad to get a good night’s sleep one of these days away from the all-night music and prayers, overall we live in the middle of a beautiful, cacophonous symphony of sounds. Of course anybody with a couple of preschool kids in the house can say the same, whatever culture you live in! 

So, noisy greetings from our house to yours.