Churches, matatus and shops outdoing each other with noisiest music

The expatriate is naturally drawn to ‘the great outdoors’, where he will sit for hours on end listening to the serenity of the environment: the occasional birdsong, the gentle fizz of the wind across a Whistling Acacia, the faint sipping of an ant as it drinks the dew from the morning grass. His pleasures are silence, calm and quiet.

In Kenya, however, the expatriate may find that he has occasion to leave the solitude of the rural areas and venture in one of the country’s towns.

Whether this is a roadside town, or one of the major cities, the expatriate will notice one thing: noise!

Noise is so prevalent around the urban areas that the expatriate wonders whether we need to import more cotton buds to gouge the wax from people’s ears so that they might finally hear the terrors that we live amongst.

Why, for instance, the newly-arrived expatriate reasons, would a shop that sells nothing, but shoes have a 500,000 Watt superduperwoofer speaker tied up with twine outside its premises, blaring out some god-awful song to all and sundry?

There is nothing more likely to encourage the expatriate to take his suitcase-sized wallet elsewhere than the sound of a ‘kajillion’ decibels throbbing against his eardrums.

In the UK recently, shopkeepers who had experienced regular vandalism from ‘youths’ piped gentle classical music from their front doors, and this seemed to work, sending idling teenagers wandering off.

But for the expatriate, it’s not so much the genre of the ‘music’, as it is the sheer volume, that sees him move on. Perhaps, he will reflect, it is a deliberate tactic designed to keep expatriates away. After all, expatriates in Kenya are worse than vandals, and no-one should really have to endure their proximity.

The same problem occurs in matatus, not that any expatriate fully knows what goes on inside these metallic coffins, although from the noise outside as they pass his Land Rover, he can imagine the appalling experience of being contained in one of these perambulatory sound systems.

Or churches. God, as far as I was instructed during my youth, is ‘all-seeing’.

One assumes that his other sensory organs are equally good, and that he therefore doesn’t need the pastor to turn the amplifier up to setting ‘10’.

And does God really require the pastor to get a sore throat on His behalf, shouting as if Judgement Day itself is upon us?

It can’t be upon us every week, surely, so perhaps these chaps should tone down a little and participate in a bit of quiet meditation, of the sort that God probably prefers.

I imagine that God shares at least some of the expatriate’s sentiments, and I have some suspicion that he might avoid Kenya on Sunday mornings, as the expatriate avoids those noisy shoe shops.

But I’m not entirely certain how the Big Man rolls, and indeed perhaps he enjoys being harangued from East Africa every Sabbath morning.

Believers would, after all, know better than these faithless expatriates.

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