Sleepless in Haiti

A more light-hearted post.

For anyone who has lived, worked or travelled abroad, I am fairly sure this will strike a chord.

Reasons why I get no sleep in Haiti:

Monday: The cats outside are shrieking a truly unholy noise. Then one of the cat gets into the kitchen. It shrieks madly and scratches at the work surface, the floor, the window and the door. Half the house is raised, only to find out the cat has eaten its way through the remains of dinner left on the side, which are now all over the floor. It escapes outside to join its motly crew who are now at their zenith with the excitement of competing for the salvaged remains of chicken. Shrieking wanes to a lull just as the sun is coming up.

Tuesday: The dogs puts in an appearance. By 3am  and hours of continuous yapping, barking and growling, you can no longer tell whether it’s a massive dog fight, dogs mauling cats, dogs mauling humans, humans mauling cats, or cats mauling dogs. Any which way, you really, truly no longer care.

Wednesday: Voodoo drumming gets a turn. It starts about 10pm and goes on throughout the night, occasionally accompanied by highly dubious singing. You resist the urge to smother yourself.

Thursday: You are awoken about 1am by the power dying. Everything plugged in switches to battery. Only the truly cruel inventors of the Internet router decide that it should emit a piercing beep every 4 seconds (I actually counted…) to inform you of this fact. It’s errs on the side of being only just insufficiently annoying  to merit getting out of bed and going downstairs to turn it off. Everyone lives in the delusional hope someone else will crack first. Eventually you put your ear-plugs in (or in my case noise-resistant iPod headphones). Unfortunately the rhythmic beeping is only slightly muffled. Eventually you drift off in the small hours when either the battery or your brain cells finally give up the ghost.

Friday: The NGO across the road decides to host the mother of all parties. It starts about 6pm and finishes about 6am. The talking, singing, shrieking, screaming, laughing, bellowing, bottle-clanging, shouting bunch of stressed-out aid workers are so loud you’re pretty sure they’ve actually moved the party into your bedroom just for the craic. You are close to weeping for the sake of one good solid hour of undisturbed slumber.

Saturday: Your roomate snores. It echoes around the whole upstairs landing. You get reverberated snoring waves bouncing back to you. For some reason there really is nothing more likely to stop you sleeping than a snorer. It has a particular way of worming into your ear drums until you are tempted to start snoring yourself. If you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well join ‘em.

Sunday: A day of rest. You go to bed in the vain hope that you will sleep blissfully through til morning. Not a sound can be heard outside – the dogs have retired for the day, the cats have disappeared, there is no voodoo drumming, your roomate is eerily silent, the power is on so there’s no beeping, and the NGO across the road is preparing for a hard day’s work tomorrow. What could go wrong….?

Except by this point your body clock is so out of synch, and frankly so completely mashed, that you find yourself waking up pretty much every hour on the hour in the expectation, led by painful experience, that something will find a way to wake you.

Even if its yourself.

In light of my new found level of sleep deprivation I have gained a healthy admiration for people who do this on a regular basis including aid workers, parents, people who work night shifts, doctors and other professions who are frequently on call, insomniacs, and anyone who sleeps outdoors. I share your pain.

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