Rainy Season - La Fin

During Sunday afternoon, the wind started picking up and dark clouds were on the horizon.  It's still the rainy season, and this brusque change in weather, it had been sunny the whole day, is pretty normal.  Only since it's late September, and the rainy season is petering out, all the build up for rain didn't happen.  Weak sauce.

 

This rainy season has been an up-and-down affair.  It started off quickly in April, and people rushed to plant their crops.  The problem was it didn't really rain again for another month, making everyone anxious.  The rain did eventually pick up by June and early July and has been steady since, but the corn and millet harvests probably won't be as big as they were last year, not helping the already inevitable price rises.  I'm not sure about cotton, but cotton production has gone down considerably in the last couple of years, at least in the Lagdo area.  Peanuts, on the other hand, are doing well this year.  It seems like if you're a farmer, if it's not one thing, than it's the other.

 

There are three nice benefits of the rainy season from a non-agricultural point of view.  First, it marks the end of all the dust and haziness that's floating around.  Second, everything becomes green and looks nice.  Third, during a storm and for the next day or two, the temperature is lowers and it feels temperate.  It gets to about 80 degrees, which makes me cold nowadays.  I wish I were joking about that.  The problem with the end of rainy season is that all three of these benefits reverse almost instantly.  There is a "mini hot season" in October before the "winter" sets in for December and January; the land and plants dry out by November; and the haziness has already crept back.  The end of the rainy season reminds you how harsh a place Northern Cameroon is sometimes.