Our Neighbor

When E and I arrived in Kenya at the apartment, we noticed that there seemed to be a lot of cars around with squeaky breaks, and they were particularly noticeable from our bedroom, at around 8 PM. However, we soon realized that the sound was not due to cars, but rather from our next-apartment neighbor, Mr. Parrot.

Parrots in America are typically taught to say idiotic yet charming things like “Hello” and “Polly wanna cracker?”. Apparently Kenyan parrots are left to their own devices though so our friend has learned the ambient sounds from his surroundings. He dazzles us every evening with such fan favorites as “Brakes”, “Car Alarm Arming”, “Car Alarm”, “Musical Scales”, and finally, “Jambo”. He’ll often reel off a string of five or six of these in a row, as if he’s showing off. Usually he wraps up at a reasonable hour, but occasionally, he performs well into the night. It’s pretty jarring to be woken up by a car alarm basically going off in our room. One night he must have spaced his calls out every five minutes or so, just enough that I kept waking from near-sleep, which resulted in the can’t-go-to-sleep anger that lead to me to contemplate going next door and releasing him into the wild / something worse.

They used to keep him on the front porch but he was becoming a menace to the matatus. Locals often whistle when they want a matatu to stop and Mr. Parrot was notorious for throwing down a long whistle right when they were going by. Now they keep him in the room next to ours where he’s a menace only to us but at least the matatus can resume driving at 900 miles per hour.

Finally, I’m getting my research on track in the lab. Untold amounts of politics are involved in working here, and I happened to be on the unlucky side of some, which delayed the start of my intended project for six weeks. It wasn’t all bad, as it gave me a chance to spend more time studying Swahili with E, more time in the operating room meeting other docs, as well as time to work on a proposal for another potential project while I’m here. However, I am very glad to have this limbo portion of our visit behind us (hopefully).