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As fear and uncertainty lurk in the air,

And residents shelter in place in despair,

Nobody knows what the future will hold,

Yet the old cherry blossom stands mighty and bold.

Her branches sway back and forth in the breeze,

While a few daring tourists try not to sneeze,

She blooms in the air that will soon turn to heat,

As she flowers once again, a magnificent feat.

She thinks not about whether the weekend is here,

Or how many will gather and join her in cheer,

For her eyes cannot see the danger outside,

And her delicate petals have nowhere to hide.

She only can sense that the moment has come,

To announce to Washington that springtime has sprung.

Describing daily life in Guinea to someone who has never traveled outside the United States is a major struggle. You can read all you want about Guinea (and there isn’t really much, especially if you don’t speak French), but nothing will truly prepare you for what you experience once you get off the plane. There is a lot of initial sensory overload, particularly for people who have daytime flights from Europe that land them in the heart of Conakry at evening rush hour. Jet lagged and slapped with stifling heat, many people are overwhelmed by their first foray into a bustling African capital. To say that Guinea’s cities both small and large are vivacious, animated places would be an understatement. There are thousands of people out and about in the streets every day doing their daily errands, working, selling and buying things at the market, and just living life. The streets are overloaded with pedestrians carrying everything but the kitchen sink on their head and babies on their backs secured only by a secondhand bath towel.

The activity of these downtown markets forces all five of your senses to work overtime just to keep up with your ever evolving surroundings. Since God has blessed Guinea with beautiful weather for much of the year, life is generally lived outdoors, and so the shared airspace is cluttered with commotion. Your eyes are constantly peeled and darting back and forth in search of items on your shopping list—markets are not organized by product, meaning you’ll just have to test your luck to see if you can find the location of the carrot vendors today or whether you happen to run into that one guy who you’re sure is definitely walking around selling colanders… somewhere. You will be forced to smell every single food item for sale, whether it’s grilled goat meat, freshly churned peanut butter, roasted cassava root, curdled milk, heaping piles of raw fish, or the absolutely ridiculous amount of fried dough. You have to make sure motorcycle taxis don’t plow into you and that the guy selling baguettes out of a wheelbarrow doesn’t graze your knee as he walks by, or that you don’t trip over a knee-high toddler lallygagging behind her mother. And as with any public place, you’re keeping an eye out for people who might reach into your pockets…a rare event in Guinea but you always have to be careful.

But today I want to focus on one specific sense that I feel provides a lot of insight into life here, both in the city and the countryside. No, not the visuals, we have pictures for those. And I’m not talking about smell either, though that’s certainly potent. It’s the sound. Sound is how birders distinguish between species. Sound is how to tell good bread from bad bread. Sound is how most of us communicate day to day. And the sounds of Guinea are are a marvelous mélange of this country’s languages, culture, and lifestyle.

So let’s embark on an imaginary journey together to explore Guinean civilization.

~*~

There are some sounds that are ubiquitous in this nation, such as the peculiar sounding local languages. Guinea has over two dozen, and when you’re in a city that isn’t deep within the territorial confines of one particular language, you can usually hear several if you pay attention. Pular, for example, has distinct glottal stops and a unique noun class agreement system formed by rhyming adjectives and articles with the nouns they describe. Malinké has a consonant formed by combining the letters g and b. And sometimes I feel like Sousou is just spoken straight out of the back of your throat (I struggled for days to pronounce “how did you sleep?” correctly). These languages also have words to refer to foreigners, and if you’re white-skinned, you’ll never stop hearing them once someone points them out to you and you realize what’s going on. Five year old kids shout out relentlessly, “Foté! Foté! Comment tu t’appelles?!” A vendor yells out, “Hey Porto, hey! Arii gaa!” A crowd of children chant, “Toubaaaaaabou, Toubaaaaaaabou!” Such is life when you’re the only foreigner in town that day.

The call to prayer is another staple sound of Guinea—five times a day the words Allahu Akbar reverberate loud and clear across every city and village, calling the faithful to reflect on what is important in life. Some will roll out a prayer mat, some will head to the mosque, and others will continue shouting and laughing. There is the rain, a blessing from nature which has simply become a way of life in Guinea. It cascades incessantly down from the heavens creating the hum of a thousand tiny drums as it slams onto rickety tin roofs. Some places in Basse-Côte receive five inches per week in the rainy season (June-November), accompanied with thunder and lightning storms that illuminate the unsuspecting night sky with the near constant glow of dissipating electricity. And then there are the motorcycles. These roaring engines create the bulk of noise pollution in any busy city, as they zip up and down the streets at daring speeds, honking their horns and weaving in and out of passers-by. Despite living in a country where being on time is gauche and being late is the standard, it still seems that they’re all in a road race, even as they are signaled to stop by the sharp whistle of a gendarme directing traffic at a busy junction.

Entering a market zone engenders a new auditory experience, from the sizzling oil of frying pans filled with fish or corn fritters cooking over an open fire pit, to the blasting radio station disseminating the day’s news updates, to the middle aged man arguing with a vendor over the quality of kola nuts or the price a Chinese made smartphone. But most of all, you’ll hear people shouting the names of their products, imploring you to come and have a look. “Buy fresh fish, 1000 francs each!” “Cold water, ice cold water here!” “Hey boss, come try on a shirt!” “Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoooooes!” For people who are, I guess, too lazy to perform this ritual of courting clients, there are bullhorns with prerecorded messages that loop in a dizzying and irritating shrill that grates at your ear. Just imagine a strident voice screaming “kilts for twenty thousand!” in a foreign language over and over and over again.

As we begin to distance ourselves from the downtown central market, we will once again notice a change in sounds. Walking by the blacksmiths means hearing a cacophony of strikes as a dozen strips of metal are whipped across anvils and warped with the clout of a hammer. They’re making everything from metal spoons to cooking pots to fire pits. Farther still we encounter the mechanics, each with a buzzing, vibrating generator to power their equipment. One has an air pump to inflate a tire; another has a welding machine to refit a busted rim; a third has a circular saw and is praying that his handiwork will allow his client’s rusty 1978 Renault to convert gasoline into movement once again.

As we leave the mechanics and pass the southbound cross-country taxi stand, a swarm of hopeful chauffeurs surround us, asking where we’re going. “Conakry? Mamou? Kankan? Nzérékoré? Bamako?” That last one makes you do a double take—Bamako is hundreds of miles away at the fringes of a neighboring war-torn country, but sure enough there’s a driver headed that way. After politely refusing all of them, the local motorcycle taxis heckle us by calling out “On va aller? On va aller? En yahay? En yahay?” (We gonna go?). As if the second young man doesn’t hear our response to the first, he too will ask if we need a ride…as will the third, fourth, and fifth guy in line. Better to just shake a finger toward all of them and keep plundering forward through the endless mob of people.

Now let’s take a refreshing break from the urban mayhem to experience Guinea’s bucolic heartland, a flowing carpet of small villages, fields, and rolling hills that stretches beyond space and time. The tumultuous pandemonium of the city quickly gives way to a picturesque landscape dotted with palm tree forests, quaint settlements, grazing pastures, and thatched roof huts by the dozen. Life is slower in the rural communes, where it would almost look as though one had traveled back in time were it not for the proliferation of cell phones and automobiles. The noises here are fewer and far between, so you’ll get to experience each one individually and appreciate its purpose. Take a deep breath in, now breathe out: we’re about to begin our day au village.

~*~

Shortly before dawn, we are gently aroused from our sound sleep by the sunrise call to prayer from the local mosque. After prayers have been completed, the mosque will begin playing praise songs over the loud speaker, a gentle voice humming to fill the morning air with good spirits. But don’t get too comfortable—the neighbors have roosters. Sur enough, one of them decides you’ve had enough rest for the night and screams “cock-a-doodle-do!” at the top of its lungs. He repeats the same salutation every few minutes just to be sure you haven’t fallen back to sleep. Take a peek out the window and you can hear the crickets chirping in the grass. They’re slowest in the morning because the temperature is lowest between 4:30-7:00am. As the sun rises, the birds begin tweeting away. And at 7:30 we hear another sound designed to summon the population—except this time it’s not Muslims they seek to gather together, it’s the students. The bell at most schools is an old tire rim hanging from a tree, which the chef d’établissement is supposed to strike several times every morning with a thick, solid wooden mallet. This is a thirty minute warning for anyone within earshot of the school.

As we step outside, it becomes clear that some Guineans have been hard at work since before we woke up. Off in the distance, you can hear the soft call of a woman wandering the village selling a morning meal to go. She’s been up since 4am turning rice, fonio, or corn into a steaming hot breakfast porridge that sells for 10 cents a cup, and she makes her presence known as she threads her way through the pathways, carrying 15 gallons of liquid on her head. As we make our way to school, the local fabric producers each have their task for the day. One family has a loom for weaving, with cotton strands stretching 20 meters across their yard. An elderly man’s wrinkled hands toss a reel of yarn back and forth through the teeth of the loom as his feet depress levers that raise and lower the wooden beams. The motions make a tick-tok sound that resembles tongue clucking. The next family several huts over hosts the village tailor and his apprentices. The manually powered sewing machines are spinning away, with the clicking sound of a needle repeatedly piercing the fabric that will soon be a holiday outfit, a new school uniform, or a wedding gown. Then we pass the school children who are tasked with the fun part the production chain—once the fabric has been soaked in the traditional royal indigo colored dye, it must be whacked with a mallet over a heavily dented wood log to bleed out excess ink. Two kids sit face to face as they coordinate knocking the fabric one after another in a steady metronomic rhythm that resonates across the neighborhood.

As we enter the schoolyard—probably behind schedule—a chorus of students begins to mumble the Guinean national anthem to start the day: “Peuple d’Afrique, le passé histor—” But they are soon silenced by a teacher who reproaches their lack of zeal, demanding that they belt it out from the heart and show some pride! Soon enough the troop disbands into a noisy chatter as they make their way to their first of two classes that day.

Fast forward a bit to the afternoon, when the full heat of the Equatorial sun comes blazing down to earth. It’s at least 90 degrees, but it could be over 100; it’s better not to check the actual numbers. Siesta may be a classically Spanish tradition but any climate with uncomfortable afternoons is bound to require a nap before returning to work. As everyone hides in their huts or under the shade of a mango tree, an eerie silence falls upon the village. There is no chatter, no machines whirring, no call to prayer, no cars driving by. The hush is only occasionally interrupted by the cry of a baby sheep who has lost his mother, or a cow calling out to her friends to say “I found some tasty grass, everyone!” A lizard crawls through the grass in front of you, undeterred by the heat. The wind blows softly at your back, creating a wavelike pattern as the bending blades of grass swish back and forth. If you close your eyes for a minute and just listen, you can hear the peace and quiet permeating the air.

As the scorching heat begins to subside, the students and other children will gather for pickup sports matches on their makeshift soccer field. They’re shouting on the field to pass, block, and shoot. They’re shouting from the sidelines to run, run, run! And the piercing whistle of the referee signals a foul or halftime, when everyone dashes off to munch on some oranges before heading back to the game. At sunset, the evening call to prayer will signal the end of today’s face off, and the kids will start to meander their way back to their huts and houses for dinner. But the day isn’t quite done yet…

Shortly after 10pm, the music begins. The little cabin across the street transforms into a boîte de nuit for the youngsters who want to celebrate winning a soccer match, a baptism in the village, or just the end of the week. Guinean music is upbeat, cheerful, repetitive, and loud; if you’re anywhere near the speakers it sounds like every knob was ratcheted up to maximum. The songs sing in a mix of languages: some are songs in local languages recorded by Guinean artists, others are more pan-African Francophone pop music. The kids will pass the night there, sometimes returning home as late as 3 or 4am. As they head home for the night, they will walk in the relative quiet of the night, where the only creatures stirring are the crickets and the mosquitos.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the Guinean landscape will come alive with these sounds. The hustle and bustle of the urban marketplaces, the intermingling of people from all walks of life flooding the streets as they move about their day, the sounds of workers on the job, and the calm afternoons in the countryside will come and go in a perpetual cycle. Many of these sounds have existed for hundreds of years and will exist for hundreds more, like the chatter of a goat family, the pitter-patter of the rain, or the woman shouting at you to buy eggplants for 4 cents each. Others, like the ringing telephone or the rumbling of a generator are recent imports, which contrast almost comically with a society that otherwise looks frozen in different era. But regardless of their origins, these are just some of the sounds will stick with me forever, and I hope that you too now have a better understanding of what it sounds like to live in Guinea.

The mountains are ablaze with colors, everywhere you turn,

Those cheerful days of summer fun are starting to adjourn.

Sooner, sooner, every day, the sun begins to set,

This cycle happens every year, though each time we forget.

Fresh carrots, squash, and radishes will flood the hillside farm,

This season feigns a pleasant span, purporting to have charm.

As children sprint through fields in the bucolic countryside,

A steaming pot of pumpkin soup is boiling inside.

The cider mills and hayrides might make everything seem fine,

But the chilling air against your skin sends goosebumps up your spine.

With darkness comes a somber mood and feelings of despair,

Such cold and dreary nights are sometimes more than you can bear.

As sorrow wraps around your face, the tears, they won't relent,

For not a soul escapes the hands of autumn's grim descent.