sounds of silence

just now, i am sitting in the midship's lounge during morning tea time. i can hear multiple conversations going on as well as the steaming of milk for a latte and in the background the ever-present sound of the generator. last weekend, however, a few friends and i were able to get away and experience some "silence".

we (sarah, miriam, amy, sam, ben and i) rode up kpalime (about a 3 hour trip from the ship) and checked into our hotel. the one i called with a french translator to book 2 rooms in...one 2 person room for the boys, one 4 person room for the girls. the manager had no idea we were coming (typical africa). the rooms were not big enough for 4 people so we split 3/3 instead with the boys graciously offering to take mattresses on the floor so the girls wouldn't have to. no sound of a generator here. just stillness. we got back into the van and met up with a group from the ship staying across the street and drove up to a waterfall. a rainstorm blew in while we were driving up and the wind was rushing through the trees. not really silence i guess but not 400 people trying to hold conversations at the same time. we hiked down the mountain to the waterfall in the rain and went swimming (cold!). when we arrived back to the hotel later it was to find that the power was out, more silence, and they were using tea lights in the corridor. thankfully, the water was running when we returned and we could shower (not so much the next morning). about halfway through our candle-lit time sitting at the dinner table, the power came back on. we played games until late and then crawled into our beds with only the sound of the fan to accompany our sleep. somewhere during the night, we lost this sound as the power went out again. the silence was then only disturbed in the morning by the hotel staff sweeping the walkways...and b/c of the previous silence, this was very loud indeed. after doing a sterile dressing change on sam's finger while sitting on the porch of the hotel, we wandered around the village's red, dusty roads exploring. we ate some fan ice (frozen milk/juice in plastic packets) sitting outside the fan ice building, spending an hour or so haggling over football (soccer) shirts in the market, passing a very ornate church building, and listening as a man tried to convince ben and i he would either "take us to a place where the fish would come to us" or "take us to a place and offer us as a sacrifice to the fish gods" and then finally piling back into the van to return home. even the van trip was one of those sounds of silence moments...good friends who've spent a good time together and can now just sit in each others' company with only a few words spoken here and there.

above photos...me under the waterfall, group shot in front of the waterfall, us in front of the fan ice building (minus ben) and our hotel courtyard