Notes from the Field 2009

Seriously. Sometimes I just want to shout "Shut up, Uganda!" It's 6:40am. I'm in a hostel in Masaka. It sounds like they are demolishing some large cement blocks with steel pipes just down the hall from our room. I finally got to sleep at 4:30 am, when the restaurant downstairs decided to stop blaring their hip-hop music. I have to say that I definitely wonder when Ugandans actually sleep over all of the noises here. Take the guards at our site in Ssembabule, for instance. I stay up until around midnight each night, and there has yet to be a night where I haven't been trying to go to sleep to the sounds of their radio and chatter. There are also not been a morning where I have not awoken to the same guards and the same radio going strong at 4:30am. And when I say going strong, I mean it's the loudest radio I have ever heard. Not to mention the rooster in our neighborhood that has no internal clock and just cock-a-doodle-dos incessantly all day and all night. Or how, around 9pm every night, every single dog in Ssembabule joins up for a good, ten-minute long howl. It's quite an uproar: the crooning of thirty-plus dogs can drown out all the sounds of our community. The place where we stay is also across from a motorcycle repair shop, where the repairmen are constantly revving up motorcycles to test their engines. Yesterday, a cow that was staked in the yard next to our place pulled up his stake and spent the day meandering around town mooing like he was heartbroken. No one seemed to think this was out of place. I imagine that when I come home to Minneapolis, the silence in my neighborhood will be nearly deafening.