The Rain Down in Africa

So I suppose the rainy season has started. It rains usually really hard for a couple of hours, and then sometimes stops. It’s raining now, while my laundry (half of my wardrobe) sits outside on the line. I’m usually not outside when it rains, but I have been before.

One fine Sunday I was innocently heading out to buy some fruit, when I felt a couple of drops. Knowing what was coming, I decided to head over to another volunteer’s house to wait it out. But en route down it came. At first I tried standing under a overhang, but the rain started blowing at me, soaking me completely. Trying to make a run for it, I got slapped in the face with buckets and buckets of rain – I literally felt like I was drowning, until a Rwandan had to practically pick me up, since I was utterly useless at this point, and shove me into a shop – where everyone stood bone dry. There the kind owners gave me a towel as I waited out the storm. I always buy my bread there now, and somehow they always remember me.

The weather is just so unpredictable. Some days I’ll wake up, it’ll be slightly cold so I’ll wear pants and a sweater, but then it’ll pour, so I’ll need rain gear, but then by the afternoon it’s sunny and in the high-eighties/nineties so I’ll have to rip off my sweater and change my pants into capris while I sweat all over the students.

The good, and bad, thing is everything stops when it rains. Other volunteers have been told not to even bother coming to teach when it rains. The biggest problem is the tin roofs make the rain incredibly loud. Rwandans smartly stop what they’re doing, take cover and wait. Remember that one time when I was in kindergarten and I told my grandma I didn’t go to school when it rains, she let Meg and I have the day off? Well little did you all know, but I was just living the Rwandan lifestyle that I would soon enough come to enjoy.

PS – I went to the orphanage again on Sunday and my little boy was wearing a dress with a pretend baby on his back. Only I would fall in love with a confused, cross-dressing three year old.