RAIN!

I noticed the clouds rolling in on my way back from the market. "Rain would be nice ..." I thought as I wiped the sweat dripping from my face with my shirt sleeve. But I wasn't going to get my hopes up. It had been months now since we'd had any substantial rain in my village. I can think of 2 times when a rare drizzle had passed through, but - aside from those exceptions - I'd grown used to waking up everyday expecting nothing else but the usual weather forecast: sunny and hot.

Harmattan season was nice. It started in November and was marked by cool mornings and evenings (which the Togolese hated but I loved). Sometimes it would get so cool at night that I'd even need to sleep with a sheet. And some mornings the chill would linger long enough that my regular morning bucket bath (which was usually refreshing) would get me shivering and I'd have to throw on a sweatshirt and sweatpants until the water on the charcoal finished boiling and I could warm up with some hot bouillie. The rain stopped falling and the air became very dry, which was a nice break from the oppressive humidity. It was a glorious change of weather.

The one downside was the dust. Harmattan winds blew in dust from the Sahara, but days on end of a baking sun transformed our own soil too; the ground, which used to get packed down by rain every couple days, now became heated and dry and easily churned up when you walked on it. The slightest breeze would whip up a cloud of dust that would then inevitably find its way into your house and settle on your bedsheets and books and couches and floor. I couldn't go more than 2 days without sweeping and dusting my whole house - although even that didn't do much because sweeping would often just stir a lot of the dust up into the air before it'd settle right back where it started in just a couple of minutes. The roads turned into piles of pure sand, making biking very difficult, and contributing to more motorcycle accidents than I'd care to witness in a lifetime. Helmet-less moto drivers would wear nose and mouth masks and sunglasses to keep the dust from getting into their eyes, teeth, and lungs. But nothing could be done to keep the dust from settling on your skin - something that I think annoyed me more than the Togolese, mostly because it was much more noticeable on my white skin (it's always the most horrifying when sweat drips down and carves a trail in it, leaving streaks all over).

Harmattan seems to have ended now though, and the Togolese are starting to brace themselves for what they call the "real heat" that's supposedly coming in March and April. "You think this is bad ..." is the phrase that has to come to characterize the start of the warnings they offer me when they catch me fanning myself in the shade. The humidity has noticeably risen again, though rain (in its regularity) is still weeks away. I'm mostly wondering how in the world I'm going to sleep during this supposedly imminent, deathly heat wave considering how, even now, I'll wake up and stay awake for hours in bed, dripping with sweat, fanning myself with the same straw fan I use to fan my charcoal, praying for even the smallest breeze to blow through my window and break up the stale, 100 degree air that weighs down me in my poorly ventilated room. Even the mice in my ceiling seem to have grown lethargic with the heat, making much less noise these days than they used to. I'll lay there in bed, fantasizing, Bigger/more windows ... electricity and a fan ... just one rainshower to cool things down ...

Be careful what you wish for.

By dinnertime, lightning was lighting up the clouds in the distance, eventually becoming so frequent that it was like a strobe light, illuminating the sky every 2 seconds. And still I doubted. Heat lightning, I thought.

It was only after I got into bed that the wind started up, and then suddenly I heard it - the pitter patter of rain on the tin roof. I couldn't help but smile as I felt the temperature drop. I'll finally sleep comfortably tonight, I thought as I grabbed my sheet and rolled onto my side. A couple minutes passed and the rain and wind picked up, so much that raindrops were now traveling far enough through the screen on my window to touch my toes. I wondered for a second if I should shut the windows, but I dismissed the idea, thinking that the rain probably wouldn't last. And besides - I'd been meaning to mop anyways.

And then all of a sudden it was really coming down - or sideways really. The sound of the rain on the tin roof became deafening. I turned over in my bed and my feet landed with a squish on the foot of my mattress, which I realized, as I sat up with a start, had become sopping wet from the sideways rain. Annoyed, I grabbed my flashlight and turned it on, quickly realizing that my wet bed was the least of my worries considering a small lake of dirt (I hadn't swept for a while) had formed on the floor under my window and was creeping towards the center of my room.

"Oh, Great," I said out loud as I jumped out of bed (splash) and ran to check on the other room, where an even bigger dirt lake was waiting for me. My couch cushions were soaked and my coffee table books were dripping wet. It gets worse: that wall that faces the back of the house is made of mere clay with just a thin layer of plaster on the inside - meaning, it's not very waterproof. So water had actually soaked through the wall and was staining it in wet stripes. Under the window, the rain had puddled on the sill and was now streaming down the wall, dragging dirt with it. So much for my beautiful paint job, I groaned in my head (once dirt gets on these walls, you can't get it off unless you take the paint off with it).

I had to close the windows. To close them from the inside meant I had to take out all the little pieces of sponge that I'd stuffed in the cracks between the screen and the frame to keep lizards/mice/bugs from coming in - which was a huge hassle. But I did it, although the job first required putting my rainjacket on backwards to protect me from the now hail-like rain that was shooting through the window, and sloshing through the inch of rainwater that had collected on my floor. Before I could then open my screen, I had to slam my hand against the screen multiple times to force off the dozen lizards that were clinging to the other side (the screen opens inward, you see, and the last thing I wanted was for all those lizards to fall onto my floor and scurry around my house - wouldn't that be the icing on the cake?). Finally I was able to reach outside and pull the wooden shutters shut. I was absolutely soaked, my house was a disaster, and I was going to have to give up my morning plans to now mop up my inundated floor. I found myself suddenly laughing though; I had completely forgotten that this is what rain in Togo is like!

Tropical climate, anyone?