il pleut (it rains)

The first time I awoke Monday night - early Tuesday morning - It was to the sound of rain pounding the sheet metal roof. I opened my eyes to discover another person in the room with me. Alima, my host family's servant, was searching my room for leaks. She placed a large bucket in the necessarry place, and then exited, closing the door quietly so as not to wake me.

The second time I woke up, the power was out. The fan beide my bed was quiet and still. There was a steady drip from the ceiling into the bucket.

The third time I woke up, I felt a small splash of water on my face. There was a drip above my bed now. Every 90 seconds a large drop would fall, splashing into pieces as it passed through the mosquito net above me, spraying a small area of the sheets with water. I got up, fetched another pail for water, crawled back underneath the net, curled up beside the bucket, went back to sleep.

It was still raining when I ate breakfast. I didn't need the text message from professor Jackie to know that I wouldn't be having French lessons that day. The city shuts down when it's raining. Many venders do their selling outside, but even if most people spent the working day indoors, transportation would be an issue. Only a small fraction of the population owns cars. Everyone else gets around by foot, bicycle, or moped. Judging from the looks I've seen on the faces of people here when it was only sprinkling, biking in the rain can be unpleasant. The only occasion I had to venture outdoors that morning was to go to the bathroom. On the way to the pit toilet, which I found to be nearly full with rain water, I peeked over the courtyard gate. The street was a stream.

It was still raining heavily when I ate lunch. By the time the rain stopped mid-afternoon, it had been pouring nonstop for about twelve hours. The power has cut out in spurts several times in the two weeks I've been here, but never for as long as it was out Tuesday. It wasn't until the power came back on in the evenig that I realized what the rain had meant for other parts of Ouagadougou.


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The news showed videos of flash-flooding. A truck windshield-deep in red-brown water. In one video, a man carrying his bicycle through knee-deep water falls, tries to get up, stubles again, and then manages to stand. He continues on empty-handed, leaving his bike behind in the water. There were shots of homes collapsing. And a man driving a hole into the side of his house to let the water drain out. Most striking was a segment about Ouagadougou's main hospital, which also went without power for most of the day. The hospital had to move patients when one of the outside walls collapsed and water began covering the floors. The news showed a shot of a nurse rolling a cart full of equiptment down a hallway, through a couple inches of dirty water. Patients were carried into vehicles and shipped to smaller hospitals.

The rainy season in Burkina lasts frm May through September. This was the first rain of this magnitude my host father, now in his fourties, has ever seen. There is talk of government plans for a runoff thing/canal to prevent this kind of catastrophe in the future.


p.s. sorry to anyone who has been emailing me. Internet problems abound. I'm lucky to somehow have access to this page. Also, I've decided to start including arrows like this: --> before sections of blogs I think you should read. If you don't want to read a bunch of junk, just look for those. They'll point to the imortant stuff. Many of my blogs won't get any arrows. Feel free to skip.