Okay, so I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but every Ghanaian city and town I’ve been to is full of chickens. Not just chickens, but also roosters. The thing about roosters is that they are territorial. That means that if they wander into each other’s territory, they fight. By crowing. And if they are nervous about something, like say being disturbed by people walking, or children laughing, or dogs, or mosquitos or really just about anything, they respond. By crowing. It’s not a simple “cock-a-doodle-doo” when the sun rises. The sound of roosters is a near constant throughout the day, and often starts before the sun rises (around 5:30-6:00). Depending on what’s disturbing them, they sometimes start as early as 2 or 3 am. They sometimes never stop throughout the night.
One of the hardest adjustments for a Canadian in Ghana can be the noise. It’s not just the roosters, the dogs, the constant traffic, the stadium-concert level amplification of church services, or the people who inch through the streets on trucks loaded with speakers advertising various products and religions in urgent tones. It’s more, even, than the combination of all these things happening simultaneously. It is the resultant orientation to noise that I find it most difficult to adjust to. On the one hand there is the frustrating fact that people rarely wait for a quiet moment to inject their own noise into the fray, whether that noise be attempted communication or simply one’s own music or other noise-making activity. On the other hand there is the fascinating, and for me nearly impossible, ability that Ghanaians seem to have for picking out focused bits of meaningful information from cacophony. People use their “inside voices” almost all the time, and seem to be able to pick out their names, and other bits of info from large distances at low volumes with little problem.
It is, perhaps, the results of learning to live with a nearly continuous input of both meaningful and meaningless sound that has afforded Ghanaians the ability to sleep through the crows of the roosters. Yet, even though I am rapidly gaining that ability myself, I found a recent revelation astonishing: most of the many chickens wandering around the streets and paths of Ghana are stray. That is, they are “wild” in the way that stray dogs and cats are wild. When I found out, I was shocked. I’m not sure that I can explain it, but I was shocked on the one hand that people don’t kill the roosters, because, by god, they’re annoying. And on the other hand, I was shocked that the very poor don’t eat them. Or if not eat them (because as my youngest sister pointed out, they eat from the gutters, which are gross), at least take the chicks away and raise them up to be tasty meals.
I was informed that people wouldn’t take them because the chickens don’t belong to them. Just like people wouldn’t take money from the ground because it doesn’t belong to them. So, in chickens I have found revelations about both sound and property.
Filed under: Ghana
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Wow! How not north-american! Me, even though I think I’m a pretty polite and considerate person, I have been known to keep a $20 I found on the ground (after looking around to see if anybody looked like they were looking for a lost 20…). We feel so entitled here to everything that I can’t imagine not trying to do everything I can to keep my family fed, including raising stray chicks (not that I could. We’re not allowed to keep livestock here). Very interesting.
As for the noise, my father told me that, growing up in Egypt (and not as a muslim!), you get used to the muezzins’ loud early morning calls to prayer. It’s kind of like having an alarm clock.
I found I was able to sleep through the relatively sonorous calls to prayer coming from the mosques.
The chickens, however…
I agree that I thought the chickens running around were owned in some manner. I wonder if the goats and sheep we see running around in the streets are also stray urbanized animals, as well?
I’d be tempted (with my North American orientation) if I was working poor to catch a number of the chickens and keep them in a coop for awhile and then eat them. One could feed them your own kitchen scraps until the “ew gross” factor was mitigated a bit by time, sort of the way we starve eels, shrimp and snails to clear their digestive tracts before we commit to eating them. After all, many barnyard birds get a lot of their nutrition from the droppings of other animals.
Folks, this is part of what “free-range” means.
At any rate, my fantasies about attacking neighbourhood roosters with water cannons upon every vocalization before 7AM (to teach their tiny, tiny brains a lesson with judicious amounts of negative reinforcement) are not entirely unfounded or unfair.
I don’t feel so bad that I told many roosters I passed by in Ghana to shut up. The locals probably thought I was crazy, but it sure felt good.
Man, I’d never be able to sleep with that kind of noise. I wake up every time the house creaks, or whenever someone’s rooting through my blue box (even with the windows closed).
Sure, it might make me a great spy, but it’s frequently maddening.
Did any of us think to add earplugs to the packing list?
It was on my list, but I was looking for the ones with the hole down the middle that just attenuate the sound. I almost picked up some in the Amsterdam airport. Not sure why I didn’t.
I don’t like my ears stuffed completely when I sleep, for some reason.
Neither do I. I really, really don’t like to hear my own heartbeat for that long. Or have something stuffed in my ears, for that matter.
Carmen, make a care package list, already! (If you did, and I haven’t found it, a thousand apologies)
I’m not entirely sure that the working poor and the truly poor don’t help themselves to a chicken now and then, but I think it would be seen as pretty strange.
As I sit here in this cafe, there are currently three different types of music playing on three different patrons’ cell phones/computers. Sigh. I particularly hate the cell phone music because the quality is so very tinny.