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All my life it is just as if I have been so unlucky to never have lived in a serene environment as I often wished. Right from childhood I have lived in the barracks and as it is the custom there we meet with people from all walks of life whom you can't culture or advice on how to behave properly in the society.
People can scream from excitement and the noise will interrupt your sleep both in the night or at day time. There is occasional tendency for people to scream for good or bad about upcoming riots or something good happening. The Barack is the number one venue for both good and bad news as our daddies need to be mobilized each time to go for peacekeeping duties or otherwise
My own typical story is when I noticed how it became a norm for our house to either be situated beside a mosque or a church, this happened Unconsciously. Each time we happen to hire a house or get an apartment in the barracks and outside, it takes only few days for us to realized that there is a church or mosque around us, in most cases it is usually the mosque.
You know how it is in Nigeria now, wether you like it or not, all of us must wake up once it is 5am.( Call for prayer time). The proximity of our house to mosque is usually so close that even without a microphone, a call to prayer will wake us up, now imagine how it will seem when a loud microphone is used to call prayers five times in a day.
Somehow I ended up learning a bit of Arabic from living beside a mosque. 😂😂😂
Another annoying noise in the barracks is the sound of gunshot. From a police training Barack in sokoto state, we have moved to a Mopol barracks here in Kwara state.
It took a while before I got accustomed to the sound of gunshots in the Barack. There is usually trainings every now and our house block is by the training field.
We have often watched even our goats and our other domestic animals running for their lives whenever these trainings begin and gunshots begins.
Women and children fight in the barracks everyday creating very noisy scenes and drama too.
We survived the barracks noise and drama, right after daddy's retirement having we moved to another neighborhood here in Ilorin And guess what .......
The rented house 🏡 Our house is by a major Road 😅🥲
The house is by the road side about some 5-10m from the major Road and also in the middle of a truck packing garage called "Tipper garage"
Been a major Road all manner of sound from different cars passing by has been really disturbing.The sirens from emergency vans gives me heartaches as it makes me imagine alot of things. The larger trucks go about their business of distributing sharp sands and stones daily waking us up as early as 4am when warming their cars and the noise continues all day and night.
The Central mosque is equally beside our house again.
What about the restaurant woman who used our backyard for her business.She has got this loud bell voice Yoruba people have named as "Olohun agogo". 😂 meaning that such people have a typically loud voice that they cannot control. Her normal talking voice is so loud that it can be heard from the farthest distance.
All of these people are living their normal lives doing various businesses to earn their daily bread who am I to stop the tipper driver and advice him against his noisy truck and it's horns that disturbs my morning sleep or is it the woman that screams for her food customers.
Knowing fully well that these people aren't elite any attempt to enlighten them against noise pollution will breed enmity between us. The best solution for me was to relocate to a more serene environment which I have just recently been blessed with.
Nevertheless I still found a church right by my fence when I moved in.
Who did I offend?
Although their activities are minimal and the noise hasn't been so burdensome like my previous abodes
Sudden loud noise has dealt with me badly in the past. I cannot count the number of times I have falling into extreme shock by the sometimes baseless noise that keeps coming from the street, increased pulse and fear has gripped me couple of times from uncertain loud noise. Maybe you don't know but noise leaves some of the following consequences on our health, Starting with difficulty in hearing; hypertension, respiratory agitation, increased pulse rate, headaches and heart attack in extreme cases.
We all wish to live in a serene environment but we need to be careful not to step on toes while enlightening people about the side effects of noise pollution.