First Rains

After 7 months of pure uninhibited sunshine all of that heat accumulated into the biggest thunderstorm in my memory.  We were cooking lunch that afternoon when the clouds rolled into the village.  They made a flashy show of it too with their lightning and they boastfully howled out with thunder and and wind.  When the rains came pounding down the tin roof of our house made muted every other sound in the air.  The show was spectacular but it was the wind that did us in.  The strongest wind in 6 years was around us and after ten minutes it stole the tin roof off of our kitchen.   The rain came pouring in and the house was soaked.  After the storm passed the house was a mess, almost everything was soaked.  It was a very humbling experience.

The next day the builders came to fix the roof,  we washed and dried everything in the house and threw out everything we couldn't salvage or we didn't need.  That night we were tired but slept well under our fixed roof. Three days after the storm the house was even cleaner than before the storm because the storm forced us to throw out all of the junk that accumulates in any home over the years. Five days later we finally, after two months, got our battery to hold charge from the solar panel on the roof so we could charge our cell phones and have light at night.  Seven days later I moved into my brand new office at school.  So in Eight months time I may look back on the time when the rains came in as the time when I started living life in style in Zambia.

It has rained five times since the first rains each time more gentle then the last.  But the rains are still very heavy, with more than an inch falling in 20 minutes.  Everything has turned from brown to green and everyone is busy in the fields planting the food they will eat all of next year.  They let me plow with a team of two cows for 4 minutes but it requires some practice.  Otherwise the next few week for me will be occupied with multicrop seeding of maize(corn) with sugar cane, maize with potatoes, peanuts and a whole assortment of vegetables.  There's plenty of land to go around here so there should be enough land to feed the extra North American at the table.