The Soundscape of Haiti

     Each morning at about 6, I get my wakeup call. Ken rides past my bedroom window on his motorcycle on the way from his house to the generator to start it up for the early morning cycle. If Ken’s motorcycle doesn’t wake me up, it’s the chickens. They start their cackling early. There must be hundreds of chickens in Christianville as part of the egg production plant. Maybe it’s the same sort of sounds you hear out by the chicken farms on the Maryland Eastern Shore.

     The sound of crows cawing in the morning is really annoying but not as annoying as the rooster who crows at all hours of the night, usually starting at 3 am. Rumor has it that Edsel once was so upset about the racket that a rooster was making that he put a $20.00 (US) bounty on the rooster. I don’t know if he ever paid. The dogs participate in the sounds of Haiti also. Smiley and Squirrely like to bark when trucks come into the compound. They bark at Haitians a lot, but not at blans. Many Haitians do not treat dogs very well. Maybe the dogs have unpleasant memories.

     Sometimes I hear cows. Sometimes I hear goats. Sometimes I hear a goat that got its head stuck in the fence. The grass is always greener on the other side and sometimes these goats forget they have horns. They stick their head through the opening in the fence to eat the grass on the other side and when they pull their head back, their horns get stuck on the fencing. Either they work themselves free or they keep bleating until someone comes to free them. So I hear goats.

  I hear birds all day long but I rarely see them. If you look closely, you can see birds in the trees or flying about. But I don’t remember ever seeing any birds on the ground at Christianville. I don’t know why.

  At night the crickets produce a constant background noise. When the air is still, you can hear the sounds of traffic on the National Route 2. Trucks and air horns. But no sounds of sirens, no fire trucks, ambulances, or police cars screaming down the road like I so often hear back in Silver Spring. I just hear the sounds of diesel trucks and their horns blaring as they lumber along the National Route 2. When the sounds of the trucks die down, you hear the crickets again.

  On weekend nights, as I lay in bed, I often hear music, dance music, Dominican music. I don’t know where the club is. I’ve been told it’s probably not even a club. Maybe it is just a crowd of people hanging out. The music generally dies down by midnight.

  When it is quiet again, I hear the noises of gravity, things falling out of the trees.

Palm frond waiting to fall

Things fall out of the trees here all the time. There is no autumn season where the leaves all turn colors and fall from the trees. Here the trees always have leaves and the leaves are always green. But they fall from the trees all the time. They don’t even need a wind to cause them to fall. And when they fall, some of these leaves make noise. A large palm frond tumbling down from the tree into the yard outside my window or thumping onto the metal roof over my head can keep you awake at night. But the worst is when the mangos fall on the metal roof. It is more than a thump. It is a bang and a roll and then a thump. But you get used to it, if you want to get any sleep.