"Rain, Rain, Come Again...."

“Rain, rain, come again.

We want to be as wet as the waaaaater.”

This was the chant the children sang as we hiked down the mountain in the blazing heat, watching the rain pour down on the mountains behind us, and blot out the Tanzanian mountains on the lake across from us, yet leaving our dear village desperately dry.

Global Warming, or whatever you wish to interpret it as, may be used as a sort of joke to explain away strange weather patterns where I am from, but here it is no joke.  Here unpredictable weather means that the planting seasons become dangerously unreliable.  It means hat families can spend all their money on fertilizer, and spend days planting crops, only to have the rains disappear again and the crops to wither in the heat, as the price of the remaining food in the market creeps higher and higher. 

And still the rains don’t come.

Faces turn towards the sky, whispering prayers to beckon the heavy, dark clouds nearer.

And still the rains don’t come.

“Rain, rain, come again.

We want to be as wet as the waaaaater.”