Deciphering Sorrow through the Din (Journal Entry)

4:20 pm - It’s Sunday. The power went off around 9 or 10 PM last night and it’s been off ever since. I wasn’t feeling well this morning and have been home all day, with the exception of finding some food to eat for brekfast/lunch. I’ve been fiddling with broken electronics to pass the time this afternoon and to keep my mind from locking in on the loneliness of this empty house. Without the sounds of the children playing inside and out - talking, laughing, asking questions, and giving me their advice - and without Carrie’s smile and warm presence, this house seems more like a tomb than a home. So I was taking apart a voltage stabilizer that blew up in order to scavenge useful parts. It’s amazing how many great little screws, nuts and bolts, switches, small lights, pieces of wire, and power plugs you can scavenge from something! After I finished with that, I moved on to modifying a cheap battery backup unit I bought in town last year to be able to use an old gigantic truck battery I found left over from the last tenant of this house. Whilst turning screws, clipping wires, and getting very creative with electrical tape, I realized something. I realized that for some time now, over the somewhat muffled sound of the U.N. office’s enormous generator next door, I had been hearing an unusual sound. It’s strange when you hear something, but then realize that you’ve been hearing it for a while now without consciously recognizing it. So I tuned my conscious thoughts to the frequency of the sound and was able to make out what sounded like wailing, mixed with laughter, mixed with talking. The confusion of sounds either overwhelmed my conscious mind with too many mixed signals to know what exactly was going on, or it was just too lazy to care. Because shortly after pausing to listen, I turned my attention back to my electronic autopsy. A short while later the sounds in the background once again forced their way into the part of my mind that actually cares and is also curious. So I stopped again and went to the opened front door and stood at the screen. I listened carefully and was sure that I was hearing wailing, but then also, and almost at the same time, laughter. It was the kind of laughter that people laugh when someone has done or said something funny and you’re laughing at them. Because the wailing was so diametrically different from any sound that you would here in conjunction with mocking laughter, I again decided that I was just not hearing things right and everything was okay. After all, there were many people laughing. A while later, after growing weary of the “no electricity” situation, I decided to drive into town to get some fuel and parts to try and get the old little “knock-off” generator we have to work (I’m still working on getting a new one and hope to have it by the end of the month). As I pulled away, I noticed some people at a nearby house talking and laughing and realized that this must have been the talking and laughing I had been hearing. Then I thought, “But why did I think there was wailing? Have I lost my mind?” As I continued down the dirt road another 100 meters, turned right at the bend and continued another 100 meters, and then turned left onto the main road and continued another 200 meters, suddenly there it was the again! Wailing! It was a woman. It was coming from my left and it was louder than I had heard it all day. It was incessant. It was deep and sorrowful and heartfelt. It was actually painful to listen to, causing an automatic sympathetic sickness in my gut. It was coming from Maweni hospital, which is situated due north of my house, about 500 meters! For a couple of hours I had been hearing the neighbors, just one door down, outside of their home talking and laughing. But mixed in with the familial, familiar, and joyful sounds of Sunday afternoon banter, was the horrid howl of a family suffering bitter loss, and that coming from a quarter of a mile away! To feel the pain of loss so deeply and completely that it cannot be contained and can be heard such a long distance away for so long a time... I could only imagine that it was a mother and her family mourning the loss of a child. Probably another case of malaria, TB, meningitis, or AIDS. I don’t want to know that pain - the pain of losing a child - but I feel that today my soul was penetrated by sound, and for the second time in my life I tasted of it, just a little.