The Rainy Season

Rwanda has a long rainy season from mid-February to mid-May and short rainy season in October and November.  The long rainy season came early this year and has rained generally everyday for a couple of hours a day (though maybe not continuously).  Thankfully when Lucy's mother was here last week didn't rain that much and if it did it was during the night.  I am used to seeing the rain roll in from the west out our kitchen window in Rosemark, but it is much more dramatic here.  Often as the rain approaches, 50% of your view can be cloudy blue skies and 50% can appear like a wall of water rolling off a hillside.  The picture below was taken from our back porch and you can see the rain moving in from the southwest.

the rain arrives it can last for five minutes or five hours and can really pour.  Since the most of the country is covered by a landscape ranging between hills and mountains, Rwanda has mastered ditch digging and has a truly impressive drainage system in place to deal with the heavy rainfalls.  This reduces not only landslides on the country's steep slopes (that are always to some extent tiered for agricultural purposes) but also the prevalence of standing water (the breeding ground for malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes).  The photo below is on the road that leads to Akagera National Park in eastern Rwanda where you can see a pretty standard stone ditch.

The next picture is taken from on top of our guardhouse in Kigali (this is what you see when you walk out our gate).  You can see where the land has been cleared on the right for farming while the land to the left is still wild with a few banana trees.  This is a typical hillside rain water management chute, though they can be both steeper and longer in the more mountainous areas.  Keep in mind that all of this stonework is done by hand with all of the rocks being cut in the quarry using no system of standardization at all (and subsequently are chipped away on site until a rock fits the need).

This next picture was taken in northern Rwanda near the Ugandan border and shows some of the tiered agriculture on the hillsides.  The valleys that receive the runoff from the drainage system often grow tea, elephant grass (as seen in the foreground), and rice since they prosper in more swampy environments.

The last picture is me hanging out of a matatu on our way back from Lake Bunyonyi in southern Uganda with some of the landscape in the background.  This area is not as dramatic as western Rwanda but you get the idea.

On a related note, Memphis has been getting dumped on apparently the last few days and there is quite a bit of flooding throughout Shelby County (CA: Flooding Brings Chaos to Mid-South).  Do not fear, my family is safe!  The bridge pictured below is near our house and usually has about a 15-foot drop to the water (the stone wall you see is the barrier along the bridge).

And this is a cotton field...