Going to Love Rainy Season

Today was a good day. I sat on my porch almost all day even though it was market day, which means a lot of people come by my house. When some kids came by I busted out the drawing kit my aunt Linda sent and it was a big hit, although the kids were scared to death to use crayons. Think about that. They have never used crayons. They have barely even used regular lead pencils. I was trying to get this one girl that I know fairly well (as well as you can know someone whose language you don’t speak) and I got her to the point of squatting in front of the piece of paper with a crayon in her hand but she was too nervous to draw anything. The youngest boy, who is her brother, seemed to really want to draw something and while Nene and Mamadou were making their pictures (for some reason they had no scruples at all about drawing, Mamadou even used the markers to draw all over his leg), I tore a piece of paper from the notebook, picked up a blue crayon and held it out to him. A look of absolute horror crossed his face and he snapped his hands behind his back and shook his head back and forth as though he was trying to shake it off his shoulders but I insisted and he took the crayon, then sat down on the porch and smiled to himself as he drew a car and a hut. Ultimately couldn’t get any of the younger kids to draw anything else (we’ll try again next time they come over), but the teenagers came by later and got creative, drawing me a rainbow pigeon and some flowers they titled, “Les Fleurs de Cour” which I think means “the flowers of the heart”.

In the market today there were avocadoes! I knew they were there because a boy passed by my house with a plate of them on his head and I was like WOOHOO and went out to search for the lady selling them. I bought two and she gave me a third one as a cadeau. And then when I was buying dried fish for Yogi (at 4 for a mille! WAY cheaper than sardines!) she gave me an extra one as a cadeau too. Gotta love cadeaus at the marche.

I went and sat with Madame Bangoura for a little bit but not long because she is kinda sick (headache today) and she says that if the Sous Prefet loses his job after the election in December (SPs are appointed by the President) that they will leave my village. That makes me sad.

As the marche was wrapping up, I started to hear thunder from my porch. I looked to the south and saw dark skies rolling in and thought, “Yay my first daytime rainstorm!” Really it wasn’t daytime, the sun was going down, but it was still light out unlike the other brief rains that have happened in the middle of the night. Rainy season is starting!

So it started to rain and boy was it a downpour! The window in my bedroom was open and starting to get my bed wet so I had to run around back in the rain to shut the window (still have to change the position of my bed, first on the agenda for when I get back from IST). So since I was practically soaked anyway I decided to wash my hair in my front yard in the rain. The few people who ran by looked at me like I was absolutely crazy. I don’t know if they would ever have thought to wash their hair in the rain. Then I decided I ought to just take my whole bath out in the latrine because if it didn’t stop raining and it got all the way dark I wouldn’t have any light to bathe by. So I went out back, stripped down and commenced to take my bath using the rainwater that had collected in the buckets I left out. It was cold water but after the hot day we had it was a nice cool-down.

Yogi started barking and I got paranoid because someone told me a lot of break-ins happen during the rains because you can’t hear anything with the rain pounding on the tin roof. Turns out someone had deposed their market table on my porch and Yogi heard them. By the time I went to bed it was still out there and it had stopped raining so I hope whoever’s it is comes to get it!

While I was out back having my bath, I looked up at the sky and saw some absolutely incredible lightning. It was so incredible that after my bath I sat out on my porch with Yogi and just watched the sky. I have a great view of the western sky from my porch and just watched as bolts and spiderwebs of lightning stretched across the sky. It was awesome. Who needs fireworks when you have lightning like that!