For the first time The HappyFolk felt fearful,
For they knew that soon the Monkey would stir from its deep sleep
And then came a sound,
Distant at first, that grew into castrophany
So immense it could be heard far away in space
There were no screams, there was no time
The mountain called Monkey had spoken
There was only fire
And then, nothing.
Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head - The Gorillaz
“I don’t know Clarisa. I just don’t know”.
It’s around 8pm on a Thursday night in Rwamagana, Rwanda - another night on a random week in my host family house. On a small wooden stool that I’ve carried to the backyard, my gangly legs dangle over from the cement walkway to the cracked red dust that defines the courtyard. Wearing my musty Orioles shirt and red Brown Lacrosse shorts, I use the wall of the house as a backstop and rest my head against it as I turn my bloodshot, half-open eyes up to the starry sky.
I keep my head tilted upwards as I speak, trying to somehow extract the silence from the vacuum of space, and I address our housekeeper, Clarisa, without expending the little energy I have to actually look at her. But I can feel her looking my way, trying to parse out my English.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my whole life. I told Peace Corps this would happen. That Mosque is so loud, I swear I have never heard anything like it in my whole life. How is that allowed, you know? I would think the neighborhood would rise up and tear those speakers right off that thing”.
She stares.
“I mean I’m not a good sleeper as it is and now, on top of all the things I have to learn, on top of all the things I have to do, I’m up at the crack of dawn - no before the crack of dawn every damn day? This guy is shouting, literally screaming every night at 4am? It’s unreal. Does it bother only me? Am I taking crazy pills? How do you guys do this every day?”.
As I look over and widen my eyes to indicate I’ve asked a question, she raises her eyes in non-verbal reciprocation. But she says nothing.
“I mean I guess you guys have always dealt with this thing. But its so loud, so abjectly disruptive I think it would test any human’s ability to habituate to it. It’s a starkly acute noise you know? It’s not like a white noise type of thing, so how could anyone be able to sleep through it? Like if I started screaming in the middle of the night, you would wake up right? So then your brain knows the difference between my scream and that guy’s, but for some reason its fine with that guy’s? How does that work? Ah but I guess the proof is right here. You’re doing it every day, and you don’t look like me, so you must be used to it huh? I just don’t get it. I just don’t know”.
I look her way again. After a few seconds, she has concluded that I have finished my thought, and she acknowledges that the obligation has fallen on her to produce some kind of response. Her eyes widen again with a panicked anticipation. She raises her hand and flashes me an enthusiastic thumbs up.
“Ye-is!”, she responds.
I do this every now and then. Frustrated with the slow pace of speech I’m forced to affect in order for my African hosts can understand me, sometimes I’ll just tap out entirely. I go to our housekeeper Clarisa, who hasn’t had much in the way of formal education and therefore knows no more than 6 English words, and I just start talking. American style. Going full speed ahead, I use all the slang and all the right words I can muster, no matter the size, and I stack compound sentences that would quite literally never be understood by anyone other than the most proficient English speaking Rwandans.
I do this knowing full well that Clarisa does not understand one lick of it. But in a testament to the ubiquity of the human condition, or perhaps just absolute bafflement and confusion, she seems to understand that I’m simply miserable and just need to talk out loud. And no matter what I say, whether a hateful screed or a flowery ode, she responds the exact same way. She raises her hand, gives me a thumbs up and gives me a heavily accented, but always enthusiastic Yes!.\
And every time she does it, no matter how miserable I am, it makes me laugh. The consistency of it is remarkable, her muscle memory is well worn. “Good talk,” I say, standing up and picking up my stool to head to bed. It’s getting close to 9pm and I need to be lights out before the clock strikes then. After all, tomorrow, as with every other day I’ve been here, I’ll be awake a 4am. “See you tomorrow, bright and early”. And I close the door.
Early to Bed, Early to Rise
I’ve been told that the Call to Prayer at most mosques is often a beautiful thing. It was actually usually the first thing that my friends told me when I told them that my host family’s house was less than 100 yards away from the largest Mosque in the eastern half of the country. Being much more worldly and well traveled than I, my friends and colleagues regaled me with the stories of what the mosques in far flung lands sounded like. Soaring songs sung by beautiful voices that carried through the streets, coloring the dusk-lit cityscapes with their affirmations of faith in Allah. I didn’t doubt them, as I know first hand the transcendent beauty of music that any faith in any God is capable of producing. My personal favorite, Ave Maria as sung by the male acapella group Cantus, is such a beautiful composition that it is almost devastating. I find myself regarding its title on my iPod like a nuclear warhead button, lest I accidentally click it and then later survey the total wreckage of my blubbering face.
But what I was hearing in those first few nights, however, was no Ave Maria. There was no ethereal beauty, no movement of the soul. It was, quite simply, a man screaming into a megaphone at the top of his lungs. He was screaming at such a high volume and with such intensity that the sound system rigged to the mosque tower didn’t even have the capacity to deal with it, making the majority of it a staticky and overloaded mess. It was like nothing I have ever heard before, which makes it hard to convey in words. I would invite you right now to just start screaming as loud as you can. In no particular manner or for no purpose, just scream a guttural scream while you read this, to give yourself an idea of the sound of it. And my room in the house was situated in such a way that sound waves bounced right off the back facade of the functional rooms and straight through my window, where my head rested below. So it sounded as if the man was right outside my room every night, screaming at me. Wake Up……Wake Up!!!!!!
Pre Service Training was explained to us as being like “drinking out of a firehose”, and while I cringe slightly at the overused analogy that is reminiscent of work-speak, I have to admit that in this instance it was very true. Training presented us a fully formed and completely packed schedule that included everything from language classes in the morning to long sessions about safety and security, cross-culture, and general Peace Corps policy in the afternoon. But whereas Peace Corps expected me to learn all these things with an open and clear mind, in those first few weeks of being awakened severely every morning at 4am, I was trying to drink the firehose water through a hypodermic needle.
I was an absolute mess: I was tired, my eyes were blood shot. My brain was working on a 5 second lag, and worst of all, I was angry and irritable and not myself. I wasn’t laughing much, and I had nothing to say. I was not dealing with things well. The shout of the Mosque was anathema to me on every level. The noise itself, the fact that all the national Rwandans could sleep soundly through it, the flouting of my American sensibilities, and the fact that my friends who lived further away didn’t even know what I was talking about. In the depths of my self pity I saw myself as the center of a conspiracy, a Truman Show-esque experiment to observe the effects of sleep deprivation on an introvert’s mind.
In America, under the world’s most conducive circumstances for sleep, the biological necessity still manages to elude me. I have conceded that this is simply how my brain works, and I was largely able to work with it or around it so I could do the things I needed to do and be myself. But here, with everything so different, diet, lack of an exercise schedule, language barriers and the like - to pile on a violent wakeup to a man I’ve never met screaming in my ears was often too much to bear. I found myself giving in to my temper which further exacerbated my learning frustrations which fed back into the cycle. Trapped in a feedback loop, I needed to figure something out.
Coping
Hello, my name is Alex; and I’m sleep-deprived. The first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem. My task was to simply understand what was going on. In order to beat the screaming Mosque Man, I had to become him. I had to set aside my anger and look at the pattern, objectively, to eventually understand it and then overcome it. The first night that I tried, I failed. Dipping in and out of a fitful sleep, the sounds simply washed over me - I got angry again, and learned nothing. Try again. The next night I kept my calm. At 4:15 am, he screams. Short bursts, as I’m sure he is hitting his VO2 max levels every time, over a 2 minute period. Then there is a break. Look at the time, look at the time. 5 minutes, 10 minutes 20 minutes, 30 minu- there it goes again. At 4:45am there’s almost an exact replica of the first bout of screaming. Ok, look at the time. 20 minutes, 30 minut- ok here it is for a third time. This third one is different though, it sounds like he is actually trying to sing a song or do a chant so it’s much quieter not as horrific as the first two. Ok. 4:15 — 4:45 —5:15. Got it.
The next night, I tried to drown it out with an audiobook. I thought to myself that if I was going to be awake, then damn it I was going to convert the time into something productive. I was going to reverse the situation entirely and actually learn things in the face of adversity. How about that for coping? How about that for a strategy? I fantasized that The Mosque Man would somehow learn of this, and in his own shame and in admiration for my tenacity, would immediately cease and desist the age old practice of calling his Muslim brethren to prayer. He would then of course deliver me a formal written apology along with financial compensation and a gift coupon to the finest hotel in town to recoup all the sleep I had lost.
At the behest of my older brother the history buff I had been listening to World Order by Henry Kissinger, which is a stretch to understand even in the most perfect circumstances, let alone sleep deprived in the early hours of the morning. Needless to say the Mosque Man won the battle, completely drowning out the dulcet tones of my British narrator as he explained the eccentricities and implications of the Westphalian Treaty of the 17th Century. Try again.
So it was going to have to be music. I figured that my over-ear Bose headphones were my Weapon X against the sound scourge. I thought that I would block the Mosque Man out entirely with the bulky contraptions. And I did. But for fear of destroying them with the weight of my giant head, the bulk also blocked me from being able to move around while I slept in my own bed. I was like a newborn baby, stuck on his back. So the earbuds would be the only way. I found after many nights of trial and error that with some loud music I could blast my way through the first round of screaming, take a break, blast through the second round, then find some softer music for the third round, and even in some cases where my mind was calm, sleep through it.
With a semi-sustainable solution, I found myself slowly returning back to a semblance of normal. I found myself retaining my language lessons more readily, and with the extra bit of energy I had I was giving my Kinyarwanda homework a little more (any) attention. I found that PST, for all the work it entailed, had some interesting opportunities and unique offerings. We were visited by the Ambassador of the country, Erica Barks-Ruggles. We were visited by some interesting speakers from different organizations that spanned the spectrum of international development within the country. We learned in intricate detail the workings of the Rwandan health care system, and how it would affect our work. My favorite training block included learning the art/science of Permagardening, a technique of garden creation which allows you to physically trap water underground and grow crops through the six month long dry season.
But even with my tenuous solution in hand, the Mosque Man still exacted his price. I would feel functional for a few days until my lack of sleep would catch up with me and I would have what I called a “Crash Day”; a day where I was so tired and broken that I didn’t even have the energy or the decency to try to hide it from my peers. In slouching, terrible posture I would let my arms hang and my feet shuffle as I followed my friends blindly from place to place. I would keep my sunglasses on when I was inside. My seating during each session found me increasingly closer to the back corner of the room. I forfeited all agency. I was a 6’5” sad sack.
But I began to see that the frequency of these Crash Days largely depended on me, specifically the regulation of my attitude. If I was able to remain relaxed as the Mosque Man did his thing, then I was mostly able to fall back asleep afterwards, salvage what remained of my early morning and feel functional. But if I let my temper get the best of me and didn’t get those crucial hours back, I would find myself destroyed. So I concluded that, if it was possible, I needed to cut out the woe-is-me, the complaining, the pity parties and the temper. The Mosque Man saw fit to scream before the sun rose, and whether or not I bitchedmoanedandcomplained, he was going to do it. It was just the way things were. I needed to accept that I’m in a new place and that things are different here, as incomprehensible as it was to me. I had asked to “go anywhere in the world” and ending up at this particular spot in the world, painful as it was, is what I had asked for.
Shape Up
So I tried. I wasn’t always successful but I had to try. I tried to laugh instead of groan at 4am every morning. I would grasp my talisman of strength that I had brought from Annapolis - a Navy coin that bears the logo of the Brendan Looney foundation, which holds the motto “Be Accountable and Don’t Complain” - and begin my day. Instead of whine, I tried to listen to my friends, who had their own set of problems. In an attempt to see the humor of my plight, I began to refer to my Crash Days as “Brokeass Days”, much to the delight of my peers. With my brain completely compromised, I knew I couldn’t learn during sessions, so instead of sulking in a corner I just tried to make people laugh, often to the chagrin of our instructors.
In one instance our Program Manager, trying to illustrate a larger point about the morally beneficial aspects of health insurance, had asked us a question: “And when you all came here, why do you think that the Peace Corps made you undergo examinations before they put you on their insurance?”. She had expected an answer that extolled the virtues of Peace Corps health insurance - that they simply wanted to know what ailed us before extending us their treatment. But before she continued her thought, I piped up. “Because it’s way too expensive for the government to treat sick people in a developing country for two years so they were trying to screen us out!”. The crowd enjoyed the tongue-and-cheek joke, our Program Manager did not. But hey, I worked in Healthcare policy on Capitol Hill for almost 4 years, I felt confident on that one.
When my attitude slightly changed, things began to turn around. Site visit went well and gave me a reprieve from my early morning friend, which provided me enough of a morale boost to finish strong at my host family home for the remaining two weeks. I passed my language test that allowed me to continue on to my site. My peers gave me the honor of nominating me to give a speech at both our host family farewell, and our all-important Swearing In ceremony. With the help of my friend and fellow female nominee, we jointly presented two well-received speeches - the first as a tribute to our great group of 25 trainees, and the second as a well polished meditation on the power of diversity of ideas and the importance of development work.
At around noon on August 16th, our jointly given Swear In speech - in front of the Ambassador, Rwandan Minister of Health, Peace Corps Country Director and various other staff - had concluded. As I stood behind the podium with my partner, proud and happy, and heard the vigorous applause, I thought back to the Trial of the Mosque. I thought about how angry I had been. I thought about the brutal letters I told myself I would write Peace Corps, the scathing blog posts I would write excoriating their egregious mistake at my expense.
Specifically, I thought back to a few days earlier, when we were given the final assessment survey, which gave us Trainees the opportunity to tell staff what we really thought of Pre Service Training as a whole. I wrote that I had learned a great deal. That I was prepared to go out into the field and serve. That I knew enough of the language to get by. And indeed, all of these things were true.
And then I remember looking at one of the final questions. It asked, “Would you recommend your host family for future trainees?”. In those first few weeks of sleepless misery, I had dreamed of that moment. I swore that over my dead body would they allow another trainee to go through what I was going through. But then, I remembered my talks with Clarisa. I remembered commiserating with my host mom, us laughing in the face of our shared pains which brought us closer together. I remembered the kindness of my friends, knowing how exhausted I was, patiently filling me in on the goings-on day in and day out. I remembered that what doesn’t kill you makes you sleep stronger. I remembered that despite all my complaining I was still standing, bent but not broken.
And with that thought, I put my pen to paper. I circled my answer, “Ye-is!”, with enthusiasm. But underneath I wrote short note:
“But please warn them first, about THE MOSQUE.”