Sounds of sunrise

Whenever I wake-up some place new, my mind slowly becomes aware of its surroundings in the moments before I fully awaken. It struggles to identify and recognize the sounds outside – the water, birds, or maybe cars – and to establish my bearings based on what it hears. The sounds are different out there, my mind muses, Where am I? This doesn’t feel like my bed. This sounds far away. I must be far away. It's coming back to me now: I live in Tanzania! Ah, that’s right, now it makes sense... and I drift back to sleep.

But my subconscious is now becoming highly tuned to the sounds of pre-dawn Kigoma.

The first notes to waft into my room – and my consciousness – are from the rustling of leaves outside my window. There are diurnal winds in Kigoma that are extremely predictable during the dry season – blowing from the land to the lake before sunrise, and from the lake onto the land between two and three in the afternoon. During the lake’s gasp for air in the morning, the winds blow right through my room, with gusts shaking the trees and chilling my skin. I reach for the blanket to cover up, and rollover, knowing that dawn is near.

Moments later I hear the wavering, sing-song voice of a man. I wake-up a little more and recognize the sound as that of the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, being recited by the muezzin at the mosque up the hill. “Allah is the greatest,” he recites, “Make haste towards prayer; prayer is better than sleep.”

On the horizon, the first rays of light must be warming the sky. The birds in the tree begin to stretch their feathers. The first to greet the dawn is the unusual-sounding bird that makes a whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop sound. I try to visualize the bird, and picture it having a big red crest of feathers on its head. The message is returned by a garbled whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop, but the sound is distorted; I imagine it being the bird equivalent of someone talking to you from the bathroom while brushing their teeth. “What?,” the first bird seems to be saying. “I SAID whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-hop!” the second bird replies.

Then the less exotic birds chime in: the whistling sound of something that might be Alexander’s Alakat, the chirping of a bird that reminds me of home, followed by the crowing of a neighbor’s rooster.

Every city sounds different in the morning – with different scores and different soloists. But Kigoma seems special: the vibrating leaves are somehow always on cue; the Adhan creates a hypnotic second movement, and because its sound is carried on the wind, it always seems to crescendo with the leaves; and finally, the rousing rhapsody of the birds, who are the final harbinger of morning – telling me it is time to wake-up.

I love to lie in bed and enjoy this early morning symphony, knowing that soon the music will be replaced by the voices of goats and two-stroke engines, and the crunch of gravel under the feet of guards doing their rounds. I lie there with my eyes closed and savor the sounds, and once I am fully awake, I get up and join the chorus.