Repeat after me: “chain-i poe behn shoom zhorm.” They are your Albanian words of the day. And they’re exactly what I told my neighbor when her dog spent the last day torturing me mentally. As patiently and considerately as I could, I stood in front of her in her store and told her ”The dog is making a lot of noise.”
First off, although Golem is a small village with an inflated population, it’s the noisiest place I’ve ever lived. This includes Center City, Philadelphia and its occasional drunk people outside my window or sirens signaling the latest person to get shot. Peace Corps has it listed at 12,000 which is nowhere near accurate for the hillside village, but probably is the figure counting the municipal territory that stretches for several miles. There are the peripheral sounds running constantly in the background: loud vehicles, prayer calls five times a day from the mosque on top of the hill, yelling people, my host family’s gate being slammed several times because people don’t know how to close it, roosters at all hours of the day, etc. Eventually they don’t stand out so much. But then there are our neighbors across the street.
The building across the street from me is probably one of the tallest in Golem. It’s five stories high and very new. On the bottom floor, a couple in their 50s runs a grocery store that’s the best one here in terms of selection but not in price. Basically since I’ve moved here, they have been building another building just like it on the other side, leading us to call them “The Twin Towers of Golem.” They’ve made a huge mess making them, spilling concrete on the road, digging a giant pool in a field to mix concrete and sprawling countless boards all over the place. I jokingly refer to the 8’X12’ hole for cement mixing as “The Community Pool of Golem.” It’s a way of dealing with the displeasure of the whole thing. The noise is unbearable. The trucks come every morning and for much of the last year, all you could hear were power tools, hammering, etc. I didn’t think it would ever end. Then we entered the “iron age” and it got even worse: every morning, the trucks would show up at 6 or so and drop large iron construction poles. They would literally drop them off of a truck. You can’t imagine the sound of it, iron pole on top of iron pole scaring you awake. It makes an MRI machine look like a good napping locale. The daily iron ritual was a favorite for all the visitors I’ve had this summer.
All of this we’ve taken in stride, at least until the dog. I first heard it yesterday in the fields but couldn’t see it. When I kept hearing it from the same place, I knew it was tied. It wasn’t until much later in the day, and literally several hours of non-stop, high-pitched barking, that I realized it was coming from in front of the grocery store. I asked the woman who owns the store if it was her dog and she customarily shook her head. “My son bought it for his children,” she said. That would have been sweet if the dog weren’t so annoying. To be fair, I sympathize with the dog. The leash was about a meter long, and all day it had to sit and watch its people from 30 feet away while they never went over to interact with it or acknowledge it. That would make anyone go crazy. But I feel like I’ve already put up long enough with all the noise from them and letting the dog thing go wouldn’t be right.
I told my host mom how noisy it had been, and she told me to go say something. We spent a few minutes last night concocting schemes. My host brother was a little too adamant that we poison it. I suggested just letting it go in the middle of the night, my brain clearly wracked from the passive torture it received. Alkys came up with the best idea: take it for ransom. All of these seemed like good ideas.
And here’s where I get the cultural upperhand: it comes from the concept of “turp,” or “shame.” I’ve written before how “shame” is present in Albanian in a number of sayings and expressions. It plays a big part of the culture here, i.e. doing things that are shameful. It’s not much better when people accuse each other of having “no shame.” Shame is a big motivator. Unfortunately, it’s also why any Albanian pleas of decency about the noise pollution would fall on deaf ears: it would be shameful for an Albanian to complain to another Albanian about it, really. Or rather, the Albanian receiving the request to tone it down would look at the other shamefully for making such a request. It’s different for me for a lot of things, and this is one of them. The tables turn. I’m allowed to say it specifically because I’m an outsider. Yes, maybe the store owner won’t be pleased with me and will be annoyed, but my request is at least something the culture binds them to consider. We ended last night’s conversation by me saying if they didn’t fix it by tomorrow, I’d go talk to them.
After a terrible night of sleep because of a wedding and its loud music, I was woken up at 7 by piercing dog barks. That was enough. I put my clothes on, went across the street, reciting the speech I had in mind (which would have been a doozy). Serg told me to calm down when she saw me out of my room and a crazy look in my eye. I went across the street, said good morning, and then asked if I could “make a question.” The store owner said yes, and I said, “Can you make something with the dog? All day it makes like this. Hahm, hahm, hahm (Albanian dogs don’t bark, they “hahm.”) I can’t endure it anymore. Just now, I woke up because of dog. Please, please make something. Put it downstairs or upstairs, but please make something.” Sure enough, twenty minutes later and there was no more hahm, hahm, hahm. My sister came into my room to thank me by saying, “I was just wondering… did the dog stop, or did I go deaf?”
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