As a Mancunian/Swansea alumni, rain is my home. Without it I
start to go a little bit gung ho about the weather saying such things as “This
isn’t a storm. Once I went to Manchester for a holiday and it only stopped
raining for half an hour in a fortnight” and trying to wear rubber boots in the
shower just to prove that both clothes and people dry. Yes, I have heard of
tropical storms but I wouldn’t be from Northern England if I didn’t think that
my type of rain is a) generally the most rain like of rain and b) the best
(i.e. easiest to complain about backhandedly by being stoical about the whole
thing). However, I of course also
concede that it rains all the time in Lancashire and therefore over time and as
a developed country we have had to prioritise the development of infrastructure
that facilitates movement during inclement weather. Or, put properly, we built
solid roads with pavements and drains.
However, Gambia is essentially a country built on the edges
of a desert. It is sandy and it is not rich. It hasn’t needed to spend money putting
rocks in the road to make sure its workforce didn’t drown before getting to a
mill, or to make sure the newly milled cotton didn’t become an enormous muddy
sterile pad on a highway miles from the market. It rains for a few hours a day for a few
months a year and the rest of the time it has bigger problems to deal with. And so when the rains come so does the mud. And
the water. And people who are quite happy to shelter for serveral hours far
from home rather than getting wet. I faced disbelief when answering “We just
go, people dry. Sometimes from water up to our knees” to the question “but if
it rains all the time how does anyone get to work?” My cheap sandals have been
glued back together twice. My rain coat is disintegrating.
But it is fun. One night after choir I was walking home with
my friend Mathias as usual. Suddenly the wind rose sharply and waves of dust
started trying to exfoliate our faces. We
took shelter behind a wall, then the drops of water started to fall. Sheltered
in the crook of a wall we were getting wet. Dusty drops were bouncing in every
direction, blown in parabolas by the whipping wind. Eventually I said “let’s
walk, we’ll be as wet as if we stay here”. Instinct tells us to run but of
course this makes no difference to the actual rate of getting soaked due to
maths (speed of person + frequency of hitting drops balances each other out). The
lights went out and, in flip flops, my feet were clinging to unseen mud and
stones, as we dodged cars flying towards us, unseen in the thrashing storm.
There comes a point when you are simply saturated and it’s dark and you are in
the rain far from either house. The
water around us felt like being pelted by a gritter, flaying any exposed skin.
As many years of rain living will teach you, at that point
the appropriate action is to dance and compare songs about the rain. We sang in
the rain, we called the old man out on his snoring, we asked the rain to come
again another day. And eventually, bedraggled, we arrived at Mathias’s family’s
house. His sister Antonia provided me
with a towel and an entire new wardrobe. I unpacked my bag. As I tipped out the
cup of water from the bottom, my iPhone slipped out. Buzzing with an electronical
meltdown it died of exposure. But we had a cup of tea and a new story.
Of course, there was a lovely photo of my street as a river.
Unfortunately it was on the iPhone.
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