The Rains

It's nice to be back at site after two weeks away.  When I left, the rains had just begun.  The grass was brown and dead.  The cows were bony. No crops had been planted.  After two weeks of rains, though, it was like returning to a completely different place.  Everywhere is green and growing.  I have a water tank full of clean rain water.  It's wonderful.

Theres a spot maybe 15 kilometers away from my village that I always pass on my way to Migori.  It's flat.  Very flat.  During the dry season it's just like any other part of Karungu-it's brown and dead. When the rains come, though, the transformation is complete.  This little spot, maybe a kilometer along the road, becomes a sort of seasonal wetlands.  The flatlands become a small marsh, with people's homes now sitting on islands in the water.  Where once there was no wildlife, now crowned cranes come to visit.  It's a wonderful sight; I wish I could take a picture, but the car always drives by to fast.

Of course, it's not all lovely.  About ten kilometers north of Gunga, in Gwasi, the rains were so heavy that they washed away several homes.  Nine children and their mother were killed.  And last year the rains started off strong.  They even came a little earlier than they did this year.  After two or three weeks, though, they stopped.  Crops that had been growing well dried up and died.  An entire harvest was lost.
These problems have been more and more frequent in the last few decades.  Due to deforestation and climate change, many areas of Africa, such as Nyanza and especially Karungu, have seen the formerly predictable rains become unpredictable.  The older generations still tell me that 'The rains will come by February 20th. They will go in May.'  They don't.  Not anymore.  Whatever the cause, the rains don't do what they used to; they've changed.

Now, in the developed world, this might not be as big a problem.  Irrigation, while not freeing us from the whims of the rains, has at least given us some degree of independence from them.  That's not the case.  While it might sound strange that farmers mere kilometers from Lake Victoria, one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, can't irrigate their crops, it's the reality.

True, the farmers down by the shore can.  The fields that run along the lake are always bountiful with kales and tomatoes and bananas and maize.  But start running inland you run into problems.  Many of the shambas-small subsistence farms-are on hills.  It's difficult to carry the amount of water needed to water several acres of water even a few hundred meters by hand or by donkey, let alone three or four kilometers uphill.  Few people here have the finances to afford pumps, either.  Nyanza is the poorest region in Kenya; in Karungu whole families must often get by on less than a dollar a day.

I hadn't meant for this to get quite so heavy, especially for this post being my first after a long time away.  I started talking about the rains and this was the natural progression.  Now that I have access to a laptop and internet at site, I should be able to update more regularly.  The next few posts will be a brief catch-up on my life in Kenya (in Alphabetical form!), and some stuff on the current term as I'm closing up my service.
Besides, for now the rains are here!  Everything is green and wonderful, even if the mud is a pain, and every time I walk down the paths I see families weeding and gardening, hoping that the rains will see them through.