Rains*

I didn’t realize it until today, but it had started two weeks ago when I biked to Saraya and spent the first 3 hours of that trip in the rain… I knew the rain was coming. I had come to a realization that morning that I didn’t just want to go to Saraya for a movie night with other PCVs in the area but that I needed to go for my own sanity. It was actually not a bad ride and just what I needed; ever since then though whenever I get on my bike it will rain. Granted, it is rainy season, the name is telling you what to expect; it seems to wait just long enough for me to get to a point that turning back makes no sense whatsoever. Also, if I didn’t do things because it looked like it was going to rain I would wind up never doing anything.

The past couple weeks have been the rainy season I expected before I came here and people told me what to expect from rainy season. I was told to expect a storm of some kind nearly every day to blow through and the sun would come out and make everything hot and muggy, but things would dry. In Khossanto though, we have been getting long soaking rains with all day mists. Nothing ever dries. When I started writing this it was sunny - that 10 minutes of sun was long enough, now the mists and winds have moved in and I’ve moved into my hut. It’s not what I was told to expect, but no one here seems to think it’s weird.

Me, I wish there were more storms. Sitting out or “sleeping through” a big storm in my hut is unbelievably fun. Its mud-brick construction and thatched roof keep out enoug of the rain in predictable areas that I don’t need to worry about myself o my things getting wet. What I do get though is all the sounds of the storm as though I weren’t in a building at all (without all those nasty getting sick side effects). I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night by more than one clap of thunder that you would swear hit in my back yard, or by my door being slammed shut in the wind. I get angry about being woken up for a bit, but then I just get happy and enjoy the music of the storm (in the case of the door slamming I was angry for a bit longer because I needed to get up, make sure the door wasn’t in fact broken, fix it, then secure it and go back to bed). Just be sure that all flashlights,radios, and electronics are off because they will get struck my lightning according to most Senegalese, including my host father.

A few days ago I set out to meet my neighbor at his field conveniently located some distance out of town along the road to Bambarayaa. I, having only been there once, took the road to the fields of one of the many Cissokhos (Family name) in Khossanto by mistake. It was a beautiful ride along the hills it turns out you can see in the distance from the fields I was trying to get to. When I reached the dead end in this family’s corn field and temporary hut that made me know for a fact I was in the wrong spot (nothing has been familiar since IST when the rains made the forest a jungle) I greeted “I nin tiling?” to make sure no one was in the hut. Thankfully nobody was so I wasn’t going to need to admit to getting lost and I turned to correct my mistake. This is where the adventure became a little serendipitous when I came across a patch of bamboo. Only a few hours earlier had I decided that I wanted to try planting bamboo along the back of my yard for a little more privacy (as I shower I can look into the entire neighboring compound, and they often say hi). So I took a few pieces of a couple shoots and continued back to Khossanto. When I found myself in the middle of a herd of cows with a sizable storm obviously coming I decided to suck it up and go back to the hut to sit out the storm.

The storm, once it came, was obviously going to be a soaker and the kids just kept laughing at me and saying that I don’t understand Malinké. So when a break came I headed out, at which point the hardest of the storm came and I got soaked in about 3 seconds. At that point it was not worth turning back anymore… guess I’ll keep going. It was kind of fun to be cold, but I did feel really bad for my bike each time I had to go through the muddy streams that were now crossing the paths.

At that point I came to the small river I was worrying about for the whole ride (Flashbacks of the Ozarks for those who get the reference) until I heard the shouts of joy coming from that direction. The shouts were a group of women who had been out in the area digging for gold, they had stopped there to play in the water and to bathe. Since it was a group of only women they were, as a whole, a lot less reserved in their manners than they are within the village. It was refreshing for me to know that the women of the village CAN in fact have fun and be loud and have that outlet from all that work they do all day every day. Even in this case though, they had been digging for gold in the hills. I feel that I don’t need to work very hard to let you know how hard this work is. It goes to show the personality of the people here, always finding the happy.

I’m glad I went the wrong way.
I’m glad that it rained.
I’m glad I was able to see that the women of Khossanto can have a good time just playing in the rains.