Dry irony

The road this morning was lined with men slashing brush with old-fashioned scythes. Long blades of grass flew into the air, cascading down on top of them and over the road.Everything is growing; a dollar’s worth of bush mangoes will buy you more than you can comfortably carry.

It’s still rainy season here and the land is a vibrant green that threatens to overtake all else. Amid reports of flooding in the region, we have three dry weeks and worrying follows. Will the late planters have enough water for a harvest? It’s hard to understand the threat since maize is shooting up from every undeveloped bit of earth, even in town.

A flash thunderstorm barrels through, turning questions of dehydration to drowning, as maize as tobacco are awash in their own soil, hail pummeling from the skies. Farmers’ income for the next few months is washed away in less than an hour.

Irony leaves a dry taste in the mouth.

Waiting

Having grown up in northeastern America, it’s something I may never get used to: in this corner of the earth, it only rains during part of the year. Summer and winter translate into wet and dry. When it’s dry, it’s bone dry, crackling, dusty, brittle dry. Green stands out like wealthy crook amid boundless poverty. The dust is the first thing you feel in the air when you awake in the morning. It lines the corners of your shelves, your windowsills, your life, a full-fledged invasion. Your skin, the earth, your lungs seek droplets of moisture and savor each tiny allowance.

I moved to Namibia in early June and didn’t see rain until November. I was on my way to Botswana when the rain began. I stopped the car, stood barefoot in the middle of the empty highway and tilted my face skyward.

In Botswana, the currency is comprised of pula, meaning rain, each composed of 100 thebes – raindrops.

I haven’t been here nearly as long but the last two weeks, the pressure has been building. It’s something inexplicable, the feeling that the rain is coming. Until yesterday there wasn’t a cloud in the crisp blue sky but we are animals and if we listen with the core of our being, we can feel the rain coming.

And there it was: as I walked out of the office yesterday, one sole raindrop tumbled from the sky onto my face.

This afternoon I awoke from a nap to a grey backdrop that had pushed out Lilongwe’s habitual blue in under an hour. Within minutes the facade cracked and the heavens came tumbling town.

When it rains for the first time, the sensation is intense. The smell comes before the sound of the beating of the earth, before the screen of pellets wavers before your eyes. It’s a rich smell with all that has been hiding in the earth rising to greet the long awaited water. It is dramatic transformation before your eyes.

The rain ebbs and flows, lightening and then strengthening again as thunder swoops though, but the smell stays strong, occupies the air with force, declaring its presence so surely that there can be no doubt that the rains have come.