Rainy Season in the Sahel

I have a love/hate relationship with the rainy season. On one hand, the country has never looked so beautiful. There is green ground cover and wildflowers are growing all over. The tall stalks of millet rise up with bursts of dark green beans between them, waiting to be harvested in October. The rain itself drops the temperature down to the seventies, often a forty degree difference from the hot midday heat. And the lake has grown enormously, looking so beautiful as it reflects the fields of millet, different types of tress now in full bloom and the bright colors that reflect off the clouds at sunset, as well as the occasional full rainbows that arch across the whole sky.

Sometimes the lake looks like glass and the picture of two men gently paddling their boat across the water brings me peace. I have also found catharsis in rising early to join my neighbors at their fields, working my body into a sweat as we hand plow the millet sprouts. But many of my most pleasant mornings have been sitting with a cup of coffee and my journal, the BBC tuned in on my short wave radio to the background of a gently falling rain outside.

But then the other side of this season weighs down with each drop. The nights when I am awoken to lightning overhead, unannounced and many hours after I've fallen asleep gently under a clear star filled sky. Abruptly racing to bring my flashlight, pillow, blanket, book, chair, table and water bottle inside. I return to snap down the lines of my mosquito net and bundle it up shut, mattress and all, to the dry shelter of my mud hut, hoping the net doesn't rip any big holes as it snags on my millet stalk bed frame.

As the rainy season progresses, the weaknesses in my mud roof become more apparent. Just as I climb into my mosquito net inside and grow used to the sound of the indoor crickets, I am forced to rise to follow the slap slapping of water on my concrete floor or metal trunk and put a cup or bucket safely underneath to catch the drip. It is not uncommon for mud walls and homes to become saturated and collapse, as was the case for several people in my village and for me. I stood in my latrine one September morning and heard the hollow crashing of a twenty foot wall of my concession come down in one piece on top of my outdoor bed, my trees and my small vegetable garden. It is all a part of this African experience I told myself as my neighbors and I carried away the mud bricks to try and save some of the squashed tree seedlings underneath.

(photo index: looking into my concession where the wall once stood, a day in the millet fields with my friend Kevin, Lake Tabalak at sunset)