Rainy Season in Tropical Africa

With rainy season in full swing, we’ve been contemplating the pros and cons of this wet hot summery time of year. Procuring our daily quota of water has certainly gotten easier. We can directly harvest the rain from our rooftop or tap our abundantly full well, such a relief after experiencing the stinginess of dry season. Everything that was yellow and dead during dry season is now alive and green, including the moss covered walls of our house. Everywhere food is growing, not only in the fields out beyond town but also in every unused corner, including the parcel around our home. The rains directly affect the availability and price of products in our market, with some more fragile foods, like lettuce, now on hiatus until dryer conditions return. Mud is now omnipresent, making some paths dangerously slippery, others have been severed by seasonal streams. It’s hard to keep the mud out of the house, but dust and ash were equally annoying enemies of domestic cleanliness during the burning season. A lake accumulates in front of our house during storms and our roof has at least three leaks inside, although luckily none above our sleeping area, and any amount of wind sends liquid through our less than water tight windows, but it’s nothing a good mopping can’t solve. The constant humidity fosters an ideal climate for molds; nothing is immune to this nuisance. The abundance of water makes cleaning clothes less troublesome, but drying them is now the trick. With storms able to crop up in less than an hour, we can’t stray far from home with the wash out on the line and even when its sunny the damp air keeps clothes damp and funky smelling. Daily outings are also difficult to plan because you never know when a down pour will ambush you on your way to the market leaving you stranded in some random shelter or completely soaked if you’re away from town structures. Floods and mudslides are a real danger in many parts of the country, luckily that’s not the case in our town, but roads and bridges regularly wash out during this season making already sketchy transportation even more of a nightmare. Electricity and cell networks are also frequent victims during storms, leaving us without power or telephone/internet for undetermined periods of time, unlike during planned outages when we known when service will return. The sheet metal roofs here amplify the sound of each tropical drop into a deafening cacophony making lecturing impossible and even conversations difficult. It doesn’t rain every single day, and when it does come down the intensity usually subsides after about an hour. The rain does cool the sometimes hot summertime temperatures considerably and the lush green look of the countryside is amazingly beautiful. Having both grown up in Southern California we don’t always appreciate having liquid in the sky, but the people here love the rain and hardly ever complain. The lack of rain is more of a reason for concern here, like during last year’s drought which produced endless worry and conversation. Luckily this year’s rain has been much healthier promising an abundance of food and less hunger than last year.