A study in rain

It has slowed to a drizzle, but it has now been raining for the last 12 hours. I like the rain, and especially the quiet it brings, the slow-to-a-standstill halt it brings to the hustle and bustle of life here. In Bundibugyo everything stops when it rains. No one goes to their garden to dig, no one comes to knock on the door to ask for anything, no one brings their sick kids to the health center, no one comes to nutrition programs or goat trainings scheduled…expectations cease during the rain. I like that. Even our 6:30am prayer meeting scheduled for this morning ☺ It was raining torrentially, and I was up, dressed, and about to press the button on the electric tea kettle (webaleh grid electricity!) to get tea/coffee ready, when I heard the “beep beep, beep beep” of a text message delivery on my phone. Prayer meeting called off. “Ok, I’m going back to bed then” I responded. As the bedroom doors began to open down the hall I instructed the Anna’s to do the same. “You don’t have to tell me twice” Anna #2 said as she started to close her door. Anna #1 pumping her hands in the air with weary eyed excitement as she went back in to her room.

Pat wandered over around breakfast time and we talked for a while about the phenomenon of rain…I was sitting at the dining room table with my steaming cup of Good Earth tea, wearing pants (er, I mean trousers!) and 2 longed sleeved items of clothing due to the chill brought by the rain. We talked about the fact that nothing stops for the rain in the US; expectations remain. Everyone moves around with their umbrellas and boots, or in their car from covered garage to covered garage, jobs go on, school students still late if arriving after the bell, meetings scheduled still starting on time, buses/trains/subways still moving on schedule…

The sticky thing is that not everything in Uganda stops for the rain. International flights, for example. Uganda is connected to the rest of the world, and it’s in circles of influence like the airline industry that cultures collide. The Warfields have a flight to catch tomorrow I believe. I think the plan was for them to get to Fort Portal today in order to get to KLA tomorrow in time for their flight. Well, it’s raining here, and has been for 12 hours, the dirt roads will be a disaster! Will their travel plan work out in the end? Somehow they have to get to Kampala. They will have to move despite the rain…their Emirates flight will not be postponed, their money will not be refunded because it was raining in Bundibugyo for 12 hours…some things do not come to a halt for the rain. But these are things that most people in Bundibugyo know nothing of, airplanes and time schedules and such. They do know that if it rains torrentially for 12 hours the river will be flooded, and since it has no bridge, it will not be crossable today. Whatever business they had on the other side of the river will have to wait.

The health center is another circle of influence with colliding cultures of rain…there is the culture of treatment/diagnosis and provision of care without interruption that is for sure inbred in me, and is expected on at least a theoretical at the governmental level from the Ministry of Health, but if you are a nurse and live on the other side of the river and it’s raining, you’re not going to come to work. If you’re a nurse and don’t have an umbrella or gum boots and it’s raining, you’re not going to walk to work. Then there are the patients on the ward who have varying degrees of expectations for care despite the rain…if you are a Mubwis and your child is critically ill, you don’t so much care that it’s raining, or that the river is too high to cross or that the nurse couldn’t find his/her umbrella, you want a nurse there to treat your child…value’s collide. It’s the story of my life!