The Rainy Season

"....uh... Roomie. Wake up. Roomie. Roomie, wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP. OUR BEDROOM IS FLOODING."

"What....? What? -Oh, SHIT. SHIT, get everything up off the floor-"

"Oh God it's going all over the walls as well-"

"Oh CHRIST, not my photo album-"

"-Get it on the bed, it'll be fine, it'll dry off and everything's laminated anyway- We need something to stop the water-"

"-here, use this-"

"-That's your bedsheet-"

"It's fine, it's fine, it needed washing anyway-"

The Rainy Season has well and truly begun. More or less every afternoon now we can expect a shower of rain, ranging in intensity from a light shower to a torrential downpour, which more often than not gets well into our bedroom, making our plastic-lined floor as slippery as an ice rink. This is very inconvenient, as we keep most of our things on the floor, and our books and clothes are frequently given a thorough drenching. Meanwhile, the sound of the water on the tin roof of the house has the intensity and volume of machine gun fire. It takes less than twenty minutes of rain to flood our bedroom floor, which can be a total nightmare for us if a storm strikes while we are out of the house.

All the dirt roads around our house have become completely waterlogged, and it can be almost impossible to negotiate our way around the vast puddles to get to the tarmacked road immediately after a storm. Trees are splintered under the battering of the water droplets, and some of the houses suffer serious damage under the weight of the storms- on the way to school one morning we passed a water shack which had been tipped over onto its side, the wooden frame warped out of shape. All of the red dust which used to cling to us during the dry season has been churned into a thick, dark, and lethally slippery mud. It's difficult to go out for a walk without returning caked in the stuff. The mosquitos are in heaven; suddenly they have multiplied into their thousands and are busily draining every milimetre of our blood.

For all these inconveniences, we really need the rain. At this time of year, it is the rain which supplies our water for showering, washing our clothes, and basic day-to-day survival. The water tank out on the front drive, attached to the gyttering by a rickety drainpipe, is the lynchpin of our household, and it has become almost an instinctive habit to check the level of the tank every time I walk past it. When the water level gets too low, we have to ration the amount of water we use, and occasionally just go filthy without a shower. Once it gets into the afternoon, I often find myself out on the front porch, staring anxiously up at the forbidding banks of cloud and silently willing them to break. The practicalilties of needing the water are part of it, but also for the sheer experience of being outside in the middle of a tropical rainstorm. It's not something I think I'll get tired of, no matter how many times my bedroom floods and my books and working materials get soaked through. The first time I stepped out into the pouring rain in Africa, it was like a cathartic experience. All the stress, all the anger of the previous year- exams, crumbling friendships, no university- was being washed away.

Now whenever the storm hits its peak and the hammering on the roof gets too much to bear from inside, I have to run outside and get drenched. It makes me feel so very free.