I’ll Always Hear the Rooster

There’s nothing like a rooster to wake you up in the morning.

Yes, a rooster has gotten loose in our neighborhood.

He’s living in the park behind our house. I suppose he belongs to someone in one of the housing complexes to our north, so I doubt he will be homeless for long. But, in the meantime, he’s made a place for himself up against our back wall.

Roosters are strange animals. Contrary to popular belief, they do not only crow at the crack of dawn. Actual, they crow all day and all night long. I guess they are actually trying to claim their territory by scaring off predators.

In our old apartment there used to be a rooster belonging to the family behind us. After seven years of its crowing (or that of its successors – I doubt that that rooster was allowed to live so long, I’m sure he made it into a soup along the way) I got accustomed to it. And early this morning, when I heard our new neighbor’s fierce crows, I felt oddly at peace.

They are a cultural phenomenon. Ecuadorians don’t seem to notice them at all. The other day I was in class observing one of our teachers when, to make small talk, she asked the students if the rooster outside the building bothered anyone during class. Now, our school is located in the business and tourist district, and the traffic, especially the bus traffic, is noisy and annoying. The class was at the top of the eighth floor, yet she had heard a rooster at some point that morning, and the noise it had made had registered somewhere in the back of her mind.

I didn’t know what was sadder – the fact that there was a rooster in the city, or the fact that this teacher had never had the chance to actually hear a rooster in “real life”, despite being from a small town in the U.S.

The students never noticed it, they said, and even seemed skeptical of its existence. All I could think of was the fact that, inadvertently, she had set herself apart from the others – made herself instantly foreign.

I myself proudly agreed with the students. I had not heard the rooster. I am becoming more and more Ecuadorianized.

Yet I will never fully be Ecuadorian. Last night's intruder woke me from a sound sleep, and I doubt DH even registered his cries. I will, without fail, always hear the rooster. The difference is, now I will welcome his noise.