Rain
Did I mention that it is rainy season? Yeah, this is a bit of a foreign concept for most folks from North America. I asked myself many times – how can “rain” be a season? I can understand determining a season perhaps by the hours of daylight during the day, or the amount of snowfall in winter or especially hot and cold – but rain?
N’Djamena, however, falls in the tropical zone, which is that band around the earth 23.5 degrees north and south of the equator. In the tropics, you will find the sun directly over your head generally twice a year. I don’t know much about meteorology, but something with that passing of the sun affects the jet streams and thus affects the movement of clouds and precipitation, and alas, there is some scientific reasoning for this seemingly crazy two-season system. Depending on your proximity to the equator, you can also find yourself living with two rainy seasons – a short one and a long one. Of course in the middle of rain, you have dry. These are things I never learned in school!
The one rainy season here is short. Most of the rain falls between July and September (see previous blog post). And as I mentioned last month, this makes the roads quite difficult to navigate, even with a 4X4 pick-up truck. Here are some images (taken from the car with my telephone) of N’Djamena’s roads after a rain, and let me remind you, these are the main streets! When the rain is heavy, you can’t even see the roads as they are underwater!
During the rain, it is not recommended to drive around the city, unless you know the “good” roads and the “bad” ones. When I returned last month from the US, I had to relearn N’djamena’s roadmap, as many of the streets that I took regularly, were now covered with impassable mud traps. This included my drive to work, now a two-mile drive among lots of traffic instead of the more-convenient one mile on back roads. (And people at home regularly asked me why I don’t WALK to work. Yeck!)
Sometimes, though, I don’t know any other way to get somewhere except to plow through these back roads. This is what happened one day when I took friend and colleague Magda home after a day at the swimming pool. I am certain that any 4X4 enthusiast would have appreciated the degree of excitement to be found without even having to leave the capital city. Below is my car in the driveway after the expedition, where you can see the mud that came up above the hood, and then my guard washing the mud off.
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Well, it has been a couple of days now that I have wanted to post this. This evening is an opportune time. The rain is pouring down, smattering the roads with bodies of water, something between puddles and lakes. I have called the WFP driver who is on duty during off-hours. He is right now in another part of town, but will be back soon. I don’t dare try to drive in this mess – I know that even the major roads will be inundated with standing water. I was just looking down the street from our office witnessing a vehicle struggling to escape the mud hidden below the fresh rainfall. N’Djamena is quite different then the West African coast in Conakry – there is much less rain. Ahh, but even at 10% of Conakry’s rainfall, when the rain comes in this African capital, it demands that its presence be recognized and reckoned with. Perhaps that is how the rain it got its own season.
N’Djamena, however, falls in the tropical zone, which is that band around the earth 23.5 degrees north and south of the equator. In the tropics, you will find the sun directly over your head generally twice a year. I don’t know much about meteorology, but something with that passing of the sun affects the jet streams and thus affects the movement of clouds and precipitation, and alas, there is some scientific reasoning for this seemingly crazy two-season system. Depending on your proximity to the equator, you can also find yourself living with two rainy seasons – a short one and a long one. Of course in the middle of rain, you have dry. These are things I never learned in school!
The one rainy season here is short. Most of the rain falls between July and September (see previous blog post). And as I mentioned last month, this makes the roads quite difficult to navigate, even with a 4X4 pick-up truck. Here are some images (taken from the car with my telephone) of N’Djamena’s roads after a rain, and let me remind you, these are the main streets! When the rain is heavy, you can’t even see the roads as they are underwater!
During the rain, it is not recommended to drive around the city, unless you know the “good” roads and the “bad” ones. When I returned last month from the US, I had to relearn N’djamena’s roadmap, as many of the streets that I took regularly, were now covered with impassable mud traps. This included my drive to work, now a two-mile drive among lots of traffic instead of the more-convenient one mile on back roads. (And people at home regularly asked me why I don’t WALK to work. Yeck!)
Sometimes, though, I don’t know any other way to get somewhere except to plow through these back roads. This is what happened one day when I took friend and colleague Magda home after a day at the swimming pool. I am certain that any 4X4 enthusiast would have appreciated the degree of excitement to be found without even having to leave the capital city. Below is my car in the driveway after the expedition, where you can see the mud that came up above the hood, and then my guard washing the mud off.
">
Well, it has been a couple of days now that I have wanted to post this. This evening is an opportune time. The rain is pouring down, smattering the roads with bodies of water, something between puddles and lakes. I have called the WFP driver who is on duty during off-hours. He is right now in another part of town, but will be back soon. I don’t dare try to drive in this mess – I know that even the major roads will be inundated with standing water. I was just looking down the street from our office witnessing a vehicle struggling to escape the mud hidden below the fresh rainfall. N’Djamena is quite different then the West African coast in Conakry – there is much less rain. Ahh, but even at 10% of Conakry’s rainfall, when the rain comes in this African capital, it demands that its presence be recognized and reckoned with. Perhaps that is how the rain it got its own season.
posted by Aaron at
10:16 AM
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