Everyone hopes...

The most intense thunderstorm I’ve ever seen has been raging outside my window for the last half hour, and everyone I’ve talked to is ecstatic. The lightning isn’t the once- or twice-a-minute punctuation that I’m accustomed to in Vancouver, but an endless strobe frenzy, a half-dozen explosive glares and searing forks every second, often coming thick and fast enough to starkly light the neighborhood like early morning daylight. The thunder is a constant tremor rather than a sharp assault, except for the occasional bursts so close they thy knock my windows about. The rain would be a respectable downpour even in Vancouver.

We’re all hoping that this means the rains have finally come. A storm of this intensity will have little lasting effect on the brutal drought Gabs is suffering, since the parched ground here can’t absorb the water so quickly and the rivers will swell briefly and then recede. But this is powerful enough that it just might signal the rainy season has finally arrived. If it’s so, the heat will be more merciful and the patch of unbroken dirt we call our garden might even sprout some form of life.

Here’s hoping… Gabs has seven months of drinkable water left in its reservoirs, and if this doesn’t herald the rainy season, the city will dessicate itself before next summer arrives.

For a bit of perspective on recent weather and a free(!) bonus lesson in the dangers of blog laziness, enjoy this now completely-irrelevant post below, written a week ago about the numbing drought that was gripping us at the time, which I feebly failed to post after I wrote it:


“It’s hot in Africa.”

The above wisdom was shared by my coworker Stone. It’s a lot more insightful if you hear it as I did, spoken with a deep African accent and a tone of utter exhaustion. Stone was born and raised here, his family has lived here since time immemorial, and he, like other locals, can handle the heat scarcely better than I can.

We’re all wondering when the rains will come. Since the brief shower I wrote about a few weeks ago, we’ve had a single mediocre rainstorm and a half-dozen mini-showers lasting perhaps a minute or two apiece. This is Botswana’s rainy season, but according to the papers we’re suffering through the worst drought in the country’s forty-year history. The genuine deluge that should have begun two months ago never came at all, and the southern half of Bots is running bone dry.

Everyone keeps saying “When it rains late, it rains hard”, but the consistent unease behind the reassuring words suggests that the unimaginable is on everyone’s mind and no one’s lips: there may be no rain this year at all.