Continued harassment by the neighbours...

I've written about this topic many times before, but, the Council to whom this estate belongs, has done absolutely NOTHING to alleviate this problem suffered by one of their tenants.

Nearly every weekend, we have to contend with noise at night coming from the Mombasa Women's Hall across from our estate and next to the Aga Khan Hospital and because there are no applicable laws or regulations regarding noise in residential areas, anybody can also hold a very loud party at their residences, also. This happened on Saturday night.

We were inundated by noise from two sources - the hall and the terrace of a block of flats behind us and opposite to the Little Angel's Nursery School. It took the cops at least half an hour to act and do something about this, when called.

Then, last night, there was another very noisy function again at the MWA Hall and this time repeated calls to the police brought excuses like it was taking a long time to get there (over an hour!), because they were far. One has visions of only ONE patrol car covering the whole of Mombasa like in the nasty old days. When, they eventually showed up there was only half an hour remaining for the 'merry makers' to continue with their racket, i.e. 10.30 pm. And since 'officialdom' seems to have come up with a time at which we can go to bed (including the sick in the nearby hospitals), which is 11.00 pm, there was only this ridiculous time remaining for these goons to stop.

So, we all collectively went to bed at nearly midnight, IF, we could immediately 'switch off'!

Now, mercifully, I have a speaker doorbell and at around 11.35-.40 pm, my doorbell was continuously pressed over and over again, in the hope that I would eventually get out of bed to answer. Since I live in the kind of neighbourhood which abounds with thugs and crooks of all kinds, and have suffered similar harassment previously, I decided to keep all my lights off and got up to check on my car from the balcony. This is liable to get damaged, if this person or persons unknown got no response from me at the doorbell.

I stood in the balcony for a while to see if anybody decided to show up, but, saw no one and therefore went back to bed. After about an hour of trying to get back to sleep and couldn't due to a colossal headache and this disturbance of being woken up from a sound sleep, I got up again to have some medicine to fix the headache. For this, I had to put on the lights and within a few moments the doorbell went off, again! This time, I quietly picked up the receiver and listened, but heard not a sound from outside and I disconnected it so that I wouldn't be able to hear the racket made by the bell over and over again. This person was not just disturbing me, but, the entire immediate neighbourhood since the bell also rings on the outside. Well, it continued doing this but had quit ringing inside the house.

He continued this off and on till late into the night. And it had to be a 'he' for no self-respecting 'she' would be hanging around on a staircase at such an ungodly hour of the night and it had to be a neighbhour for why would a strange person bother to climb 3 flights of stairs to bother somebody at such an hour? Unless he was paid or had a self-interest in harassing me.

All this seems to have coincided with a meeting I attended on Saturday where Kenyans are taking a pro-active part in doing something about our unaccountable and bloated government. Since I have two very questionable politicians as my neighbours, could this be a way of showing their distaste, as neither of them are capable of answering questions that the public would like to ask them without showing cavemen tactics of the type that I continue to suffer at their hands.

Will officialdom, do something about this continued harassment which is liable to graduate into a more dangerous situation as time goes by....?