For 2 weeks around midnight and again at 5 am I had been woken by happy clapping and shouting for a significant amount of time – It was so maddening. I couldn't sleep once I’d been woken and it was so loud. I couldn't explain it or attempt to recreate the warbling which was coming out of this… who knows what? Had a weird cult started up just a few doors down or something?
By day 4 I decided to ask Hananah if a church had started up in the area (a more polite way of asking if a weird cult had dropped into the neighbourhood). ‘No’ she said looking confused, and then ‘Aggghhh… your neighbours, they have a pastor visiting, they invited me but I cannot go because of the shop’… marvellous.
On Friday of the first week I was woken, and remained awake to listen to the disturbance from 1.30 - 3am. It didn’t stop. It was persistent, annoying and frustrating. Not even sleeping with my deaf ear exposed drowned out the racket enough for me to fall asleep (I blame the thin vac packed John Lewis value pillows). It was all I could do not to get up and tell them to piss off. With a busy weekend to follow it was the last thing I needed and hoped it wasn’t a permanent schedule change…
It carried on through the next week back to the original 12 and 5am schedule. All sorts of things were going through my head and it reminded me of the ‘Pigeon Problem’ at my old house in the UK. I won’t bore you with the details - you’ve it heard many, many times; about how the pigeon population of Cambridge, their close cousins the doves of Cambridge and all the other stinky winged vermin of Cambridge congregated in and around my neighbour’s postcard patch of a garden encouraged by bucket loads of food. Generally flapping all sorts of parasites, mites and other itch inducing ichy things as only winged vermin can; dropping shit from great heights in, on and around my back garden on my washing etc etc…. anyway I won’t repeat the story. The winged vermin were persistent, bothersome, infuriating even and I had only one solution possible to keep me mildly sane…. to move. Whoops! Think I just bored you. This ‘happy clapping’ was the Ghana version of the Pigeon Problem… different cause, same outcome. Ironically I prayed to god that there would be an alternative solution, you see, I like my house. And then… as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Only to be superseded by a brand new sound system at the mosque. Bucking marvellous. It would seem that an assumption has been made that everyone in Bolga is Muslim and/or wishes to be woken by, what I can only describe as, the cry of a cat being strangled at 4am ev-er-y buck-ing morning through the biggest, loudest speaker ever… this one isn’t going to leave. Solution: Stay up so late you are so tired you simply sleep through it…. Not fool proof but better than moving.
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