Suara desa

It’s four-thirty AM on my first morning with my host family. It started with the roosters an hour ago. I woke up and thought it must be getting near 6:30, when my alarm is set to go off. Then I realized I’d woken up from the roosters, remembered they start the day well before their culturally-allotted dawn, and checked the time. At four I heard the chanting start at a low volume in the distance and guessed at what was coming. At the resort we were staying at here in Kediri before we moved to host families yesterday, starting at 5 in the afternoon I would begin to hear the murmur of a voice filtered through a speaker in the distance, and then by 5:30 when I would go for a walk around the resort’s grounds, the azan (Muslim call to prayer—there are a million spellings of this in the Roman alphabet, because the actual Arabic letter it uses doesn’t carry over, but I think in Indonesia they call it “azan,” if not the actual Arabic word) would be in full force. At the resort, Bukit Daun, there was a small hill with a parking lot on top; I would make a loop for my walk, and at the high point I could see three mosques at once and hear about five, seemingly in a line across the rice paddies, all with their own azans mixing in the air. 

Here at my host family’s house, yesterday I’d heard two azans while sitting in the living room, and it sounded like the mushollah was right next door (mushollah: prayer hall, smaller than a mosque), the speaker vibrating through the solid walls. Sure enough, even as the distant hum of different azans built this morning, I guessed the next-door mushollah hadn’t joined in yet—and when it did, I definitely knew. Meanwhile, the roosters continued to crow (a whole network of them, too), and all against the  background drone of night insects—sort of a white-noise cicada hum—and the occasional whir of a motorcycle speeding past. 

My friend and I often joke about the hashtag Peace Corps encourages on social media, #howIseePC. For me, though, this kind of morning is the most #howIhearPC thing possible. It’s exactly what I imagined and hoped for and love, and am now living. It’s a quarter to five and even with earplugs I don’t know how long it’ll take me to train myself to be able to go back to sleep with all the sounds still echoing through my open window, but it’s a beautiful thing.