At the Uhuru Lutheran Hotel, Moshi, Tanzania

Since I arrived here at the hotel at night, I had no clue who my neighbors were until the middle of the night when dogs barked and goats bleated. I was even more puzzled at 2:00 a.m. when a trumpet blasted out a reveille nearby and later a capella singing of men. When I got up in the morning, I saw signs of a farm just beyond the hedge that surrounds the hotel grounds. Outbuildings of wooden planks and rusty tin roofs housed chickens and goats, and a shepherd whistled to the herd of cows, goats, and ducks, urging them across the pasture, but I saw no sign of singing men in uniform. Later I learned that there's a police academy just beyond the farm, and occasionally I see two or three men in uniform march down beaten dusty paths through the farm.

Besides the bleating of goats, lowing of cows, and crowing of roosters, the Muslim imam adds to the evening chorus when the sun goes down. The imam wails out a mournful call to prayer at sunrise, noon, and sundown over a loudspeaker. The call I hear is the evening one. Just when all is quiet on the farm, the imam does his thing, and then the dogs begin to howl. As suddenly as he starts, the imam stops, and fortunately so do the dogs.

The days have been cloudy, and I realized one evening that Mount Kilimanjaro hovered beyond the farm, slipping through the clouds at the end of the day calmly and quietly, a striking contrast to the goats, dogs, trumpets and imams.