– or lack there of!

Sleep is not valued here.  Sometimes I slept for 7 hours in the village and sometimes I slept for no more than 1 hour in a row.  It is just not valued here.  At home, if I were to wake up my parents, for example, I would feel bad about it.  Or if I was watching tv late at night I would turn it down.  Not here. Here is a list of the things that keep me from sleeping at night:

1)      Roosters – did you know they crow more than once a morning, because I was under the impression that it was only once and then they were done.  Damn you Charlotte’s Web for giving me false hope!

2)       Soap Operas – when I would go to be, sometimes my family would stil be watching soap operas.  These are never in English (nor Samoan), but usually Philipino or Korean.  My favorite part about these shows is their incredible lack of musical variety – there is one song for every “emotional moment.”  It’s horribly catchy!  “I…give my love to you…don’t hold back..give my love…etc.” over and over and over.

3)      Yelling – there is no hesitation to speak loudly, even if someone nearby is sleeping.  I would hear yealling starting at 5 AM – (in Samoan) “did you get the coconuts!?!?  Go get me 5!  Get out of bed!!!  go pick up te rubbish!” etc. 

4)      Dogs – they fight with each other at night and are loud about it.  Imagin if you had a gang living outside your house that roamed the streets and picked on other gangs.  That is what the dogs do here.  They bite each other and bark loudly and yelp too.  If there are no dogs near by, they just howl.  That’s the worst.

5)      Music – this one is my favorite.  Every morning at about 6 AM my family starts to play music.  This is not as big of a deal for everyone else (who is already awake) but the “wall” to my “room” ouches the speakers and that means te noise is quite loud.  The best part is, the songs are ALL hip hop Christmas tracks that are mostly stolen from other songs.  Even for someone with as low of a musical quality threshold as I have, this is rough.

Another fun thing about sleep is how they wake each other up: repetitive name calling.  By repetitive I mean once per second…for at least 20 seconds.  And it doesn’t work.  I have never seen someone get up when they are woken up this way!  I suggested wiggling their shoulder or shaking them, but it was to no avail.  That was deemed too much work. 

I am in my own house now, which only leaves roosters and dogs to keep me up.  However, we have added songbirds – nice once, annoying after that.  I usually wake up every night in the middle of the night (for the dogs), in the morning at 5 for the roosters (it’s still dark), at 6 for the birds and then manage to sleep ok until 8 when it is too hot to be in bed anyways.  I am working on my tolerance and I can tell it is improving.  I vaguely remember a time when I slept past 10 Am, also known as every day of my senior year of college, but it seems so distant I am not sure if it was real…