The Long Rains began today. The past month has been incredibly hot and humid. I'm covered with an oily sweat all the time, and carry a handkerchief to mop my forehead. I take 2 or 3 showers a day and saturate my clothes with sweat. People work in the mornings before the sun is too Kali, and even the Africans walk in the shade of buildings and move their little stools around from spot to spot under the mango trees. Five or ten minutes under the intense tropical sun is enough to get soaked with sweat, it pops out in beads on foreheads & arms & trickles down my belly, and even at night the heat is oppressive.

Then in the past week or so I've watched thunderheads building in the afternoons, and sometimes the sky is dotted with fluffy white cumulous clouds. Women speeded up their work in the shambas, clearing fields of dry grass and maize stalks in the mornings and burning them at sunset. Eerie piles of red flames surrounded by women & children; morning finds cleared fields with round scorch marks like the landing pads of space craft. The clouds continued to build, tantalizingly near, sometimes a grey wall in the hills indicating rain but no rain reached us, and the heat and humidity and bad tempers only seemed to intensify. Heat lightning flashed in the night sky.

Then, this morning, in the last hour before dawn, the sky broke with a fantastic electrical storm. The rain began an hour later in the first grey light, and lying in bed I felt the most delicious sensation steal over me. Like being washed in cool fresh air, like the whole world was expanding and swelling in sweet relief. It's truly fantastic; I've never felt anything like this: the onset of the rainy season after a long dry spell, the coming of the monsoon in equatorial Africa. Every pore in my body seemed to relax. Even my hair feels softer.