The sound of Ntcheu (Part2)

Today is the 7th of February. 1 year day for day since I’ve been in Malawi. Momentous date indeed. Especially since today also marks the day when I conclude my stint in Ntcheu to settle in the ‘Big City’ which is Blantyre. One thing you can be sure about is that I didn’t leave quietly! I left in true Ntcheu style. With a bang! A party that brought me in line very much with my earlier woes about the place. It will be clear after you read the preliminary notes that I wrote in advance about Ntcheu, how much I’ve grown accustomed to this one sensory stimulus.That’s what I imagined my leaving Ntcheu would sound like:

I won’t miss it. I’ll miss the place, the wonderful people, the amazing friendships, the good times, the fabulous countryside and so many things, let there be no doubt about that. But I won’t miss the sound of Ntcheu. Maybe I didn’t elaborate enough on that one!(?) But beyond the crazy fanfare of dog/hyaena howls, pounding rain drops on my tin roof and Uncle B’s sickening floor beat, Ntcheu was also the seat of unregulated noise in every context imaginable. And to my utter surprise, hardly anybody complained. Only the hardest hit (e.g. my friend who runs a guesthouse right behind Uncle B) saw the disturbance it was causing. Not a single person thought it might interfere with learning and concentration for example. And so, it went on. For some, it was a statement of status. The louder your speaker, the wealthier you are. The louder your shop’s music, the more attractive is your shop. It attracted more customers in that simple way. Thus, on our one mile long shopping street, you’d find no less than 20 nicely cranked up music systems, competing for who could blare out the loudest noise, hardly a few metres from each other. They invariably had a system inferior to the speakers (placed outside the shop by the way), which would magnify everything including background fuzz, to decibels that would wake a deaf man up! As this cacophony is taking place, one would be ill advised to stand right in front of a speaker, lest they end up with ringing ears for the rest of the week. Yet, to my bafflement, there is usually some guy happily sat on/next to/ in front of it, inflicting some irreversible damage to his eardrums. Occasionally you’ll find a dancer, inebriated far too early during the day, volunteering some of his moves for some attention.

Move away from this commercial noise, which essentially lasts only during shop opening hours, you get the night club feature which has no official finish time... at least not in practice. There is an interesting order to this disorder when you look deeper. The epicentre of chaos regularly changes location. My singling out Uncle B was highly misleading. I probably chose it for it funny sounding name and for the fact that it was my first presumed culprit. Then I found out that on any given night, there would tend to be one club that dominated the sound scene. And each time, it was the same speakers that would lie behind the chaos. This, I later discovered, was a set that got hired out in rotation, so only one club could have them on any given night. Whatever the mode of distribution though, the effects of it can be felt miles away. This is not helped by the town plan of Ntcheu- if such a concept can be applied. The bars that spew out this noise all face a valley where the hospital and most of its staff residences are located. I’m sure the wind also mostly blows in that direction! There are nights when it feels literally like someone is having a rave outside my room (Janet, queen of noise tolerance, will even confirm this for me!)

Then also is the one ultimate thing that no Malawian will raise their voice about- Religion. Of course, the sense of mutual tolerance of each other’s religion is highly amazing and commendable, but whether that justifies a church amplifying its sermons such that the entire town has to listen to it, I don’t know. This is what Ntcheu Catholic church is famous for. Much more prominent than the other churches, who also have powerful speakers indoors that can be heard till the end of whichever dirt path they lie on, this one boasts exceptionally powerful speakers (and members- whose money must have gone towards them) that sit right outside the church. Thus everyone in Ntcheu wakes up no later than 7am on a Sunday, to hear not only the singing but also the speeches and frenzied collections from this one church.
And the list goes on. Music really plays everywhere here and as loud as one’s system will allow. It plays outside our morning handovers in the hospital in the form of health education chants by some 50 shrill female voices. It plays in my orthopaedic office, even during consultations. It plays in theatre all the time. It plays on the wards from patients who do not need to check with others if it’s alright with them. It even plays next to the library. It plays in buses such that you could not possibly answer your phone with a chance of hearing what the caller had to say, assuming you heard it ring in the first place. It plays in almost every house, including mine (even though my ex-flatmate very soon minimised it). It plays in every shop and every bottlestore as I said. You can even hear it all the way up Ntcheu Telephone Mast mountain, coming from a particularly notorious “beer garden” at the foot!

One might think, especially knowing my historical aversion to noise, that this is somewhat exaggerate. But trust me, I have become a hell of a lot more tolerant to noise, and this time it really IS bad. The only way to disprove that is by experiencing it!

So that is how I thought I would be leaving Ntcheu. But Ntcheu has been my home for a year. Ntcheu has been the first African town to take me in as its resident- not just a tourist. Ntcheu has developed me in ways that couldn’t possibly have occurred anywhere else. Ntcheu has turned me into the doctor of my dreams, but beyond that also into a gardener, a bird spotter, a re-born footballer, a ‘famous’ pool player, a dancer, an explorer, a boundless foodie and so many other things. So whatever challenges it might have laid in my path, Ntcheu has become a part of me. And, in fact, more so for these very challenges. I’m so glad I had the chance to share that with Janet even if it was only for the couple of months which she spent mostly here, while awaiting confirmation of her lecturing post at the College of Medicine in Blantyre. The Ntcheu experience is so authentic it couldn’t be described merely in words even to someone who’d be living only a couple of hours away. Ntcheu is a landmark along the landscape of our lives, the freshest of them all. I really will miss it as a whole, with or without its music. The proof: today, as we were driving down in our removals van, I caught myself asking the driver why he didn’t have any music on. A few months ago, I would have been secretly praying as we got on that van that the CD player was broken!
Farewell Ntcheu. Blantyre ahoy...


My Beautiful Ntcheu dwelling


Party House getting ready!

Dj'ing is serious business here!