Rain

Finally the omens have come together. How I have waited for this moment. The rain is falling, and I am inside. I have showered, put on clean nightclothes, and made a cup of hibiscus tea. My computer is charged, and I am not tired. And just this morning I made the intention that I must write about my experiences here, whether or not I stumble across exactly the right words or phrases to express them.

The best of the omens, and the reason I mentioned it first, is the rain. It used to be a dream of mine, in the rainy season in Senegal, to be caught inside my hut, alone, in an eternal torrent. Why? That would be the only guarantee of having uninterrupted time to myself. Otherwise people were always around, always visiting me, always wanting to talk, never wanting to leave me alone. Surely if I was alone I was unhappy, they thought. But if it was raining, they would stay in their huts, and they wouldn’t worry about me being alone in mine.

Here in Nicaragua the issue is not so much people bothering me as the other way around. I’m not exactly bothering people, but, without the rain to keep me inside, there are always things to be doing. Tonight I was down in town, just finished a gardening meeting and just beginning a computer class, when I looked out the window and saw a sharp flash of lightning and heavy clouds behind the volcano, in the direction storms come from. I was supposed to teach the class, wait for a friend, go with him to meet the bus driver to make arrangements to have tools purchased at the hardware store on the other side of the island and delivered here tomorrow, and then plan another meeting. But when the lightning flashed, I looked at Nevis, my computer student, and he said, it’s going to rain hard. Soon. I left my baby plants outside, I said. And the rain will smash them, he said. And they will die.

So we changed the computer class to tomorrow, and I dropped all my other plans, and scurried through the fields, across the creek, up the hillside, and through the fences to get to the farm before the downpour. Of course, I arrived, and it didn’t start raining until half an hour later. I got my plants into a protected place without a problem. And it wasn’t a hard rain. But it conspired to get me here, in the house, alone, at 7:30 p.m. With a charged computer.

The charged computer is mentioned as a sidenote, and it is a sidenote, but rather an important one. You see, on the farm we only have solar and wind power, and we have a slightly problematic battery system, and it’s only possible to charge my computer during the day. And I can’t use the computer while it’s charging. If I charge my computer in the morning, and use it during the afternoon, then in the evening, if I want to use it again, I’m out of luck. Or if I’m gone all day and can’t plug my computer in, or if someone else needs to charge things at the same time, or or or…it’s a complicated issue. And it often ends up with me lying in the hammock at 7:00 p.m. thinking how much I’d like to write some e-mails or write a blog post. But the computer is dead.

Back to the rain, however. Appreciating the rain as an excuse for staying inside is nice. There’s far more at stake in this situation, though. I left Nicaragua mid-July to spend what turned out to be two months away, attending weddings, visiting family, and working. When I left, it was raining all the time. Almost every night. The path from town to the farm was always muddy; the paths on the farm were muddy; we were frequently working in the rain. Chris, the farm director, says that you get an extra workout in the rainy season, because your shoes are so heavy with mud all the time.

I dreaded coming back in October. From the day I had arrived on the farm in February, people were telling stories about the previous October. How it rained for three (six?) days without stopping. How you would wash your clothes and they would never dry. How everything was moldy. How there were torrents of water rushing through the outdoor kitchen during heavy rains. How everyone was crowded together under the only roof that didn’t leak. And trapped there while it rained and rained and rained.

But when I came back in October, everything was dry. The formerly muddy path was solid and hard. The garden that I had worked so hard to prepare and plant before I left – and expected to come back and find verdant and fruiting – was a wasteland, barren except for a few resilient beans and greens. Everyone everywhere said to me, our rice is triste, it is so sad. There are no grains on the plants, because it has not rained. I had heard the same thing in Guatemala – in large areas of the country, there was no cosecha, no harvest. The plants were planted, the beans and corn and rice sown, tended to, and their produce awaited, but the rains did not come. And the plants did not bear. And now there is no food. In some places there is no water. Or even if there’s a little bit of water now, there isn’t near enough in the rivers and streams to keep them flowing until next year’s rains begin. This is a drought.

Because my primary occupation for the next five months here is with gardening, and particularly gardening in the dry season, this is a serious issue. Because people that I know and care about have lost their harvest, all they invested in it, and all they were hoping – and needing – to gain from it, this is a serious issue. Because people are going to be hungry, and food prices are going to rise, and the economy is already in a bad way, this is a serious issue.

When you buy your food at the supermarket, and there aren’t any mandarin oranges because of a late spring frost, that’s a bit of a bummer. When you lose your job, and you’re not sure when or how you’re going to manage to find another one, and you have to quit eating out and doing other nice things because you can’t afford them, that’s a bummer. When what you grow is what you have to eat – that and mostly only that – and things don’t grow, that’s more than a bummer.