In Uganda, all movement halts for the rain. Life pauses, patient, watching raindrops fall, droplets that land with a ting on tin rooftops and delicate splashes into growing, red puddles, with a million soft thwumps into the grass and the maize and the soft, fertile orange-red earth. Life pauses, patient, and takes a few slow, even breathes as it rests beneath rooftop overhangs and crowds into shops and homes. Huddled, life watches the rain.
In Uganda, rain is a perfectly good excuse for schoolchildren to be late to school. Kampala businessmen caught at lunch by a storm sit for hours over long cups of tea, unrushed, unworried, all appointments and deadlines put to rest for the rain. Taxis, even, cease to run: Boda men abandon their bodas to crowd beneath trees or into small, corner-side shops – they must be bribed with extra-high payment to venture out to the wetness.
Once, I asked my friend Yusef why he stopped for the rain – he, a community volunteer with places to go and people to heal, a farmer and a friend and a councellor to many. ‘Don’t you feel,’ I asked him from my American mindset, ‘don’t you feel frustrated, trapped by the rain? As if you’re wasting your time, neglecting your duties? You don’t feel guilty for sitting here, laid back, watching the rain?’
Yusef paused before replying – not to figure an answer, I think, but to figure the words that would make his answer clear to my mind. “At the farm, he told me, the plants and the animals need this rain. The soil, everywhere, soaks in the droplets; the maize and the ground-nuts, the cassava and the bananas, all of them live, and grow, and produce by the rain. These things keep us alive. ‘When it rains,’ Yusef told me, lifting his arms to the air around him, ‘I feel that good things are happening, life is restoring. When it rains, I don’t need to hurry here or there or to do this or that – when it rains, I feel already that I am getting things done; I feel there is a blessing upon us.’
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