When I lived and taught in the arid African country of Namibia, my students never understood my explanations of a temperate climate any more than I understood what it was like to live in a country that received its scant annual rainfall in a three-month period each year. All the country’s rivers are seasonal; they only flow when it rains. The rest of the year, they are nothing more than cracked-earth riverbeds, passive collectors of wind-blown plastic bags, soft drink cans, and broken beer bottles.
Don't When I lived and taught in the arid African country of Namibia, my students never understood my explanations of a temperate climate any more than I understood what it was like to live in a country that received its scant annual rainfall in a three-month period each year. All the country’s rivers are seasonal; they only flow when it rains. The rest of the year, they are nothing more than cracked-earth riverbeds, passive collectors of wind-blown plastic bags, soft drink cans, and broken beer bottles.
In churches during November, the people in the North prayed for rain, as they did every year at this time. They had planted their millet crops, and now all they could do was wait. Their granaries were empty, and they could count the ribs on their cattle. The children needed shoes; their school fees were due. But their parents had nothing left to sell in the market. No grain, no livestock. They had lived through four years of drought, and they knew that some of them wouldn’t survive a fifth year.
The rain began to fall in mid-December. It continued to fall in January. And February. The people began to worry. It is too much, they said. The tender shoots of grain were beginning to rot in the fields. Goats tumbled into the rivers and drowned.
In Windhoek, Namibia’s mile-high capital, we heard stories of people in the squatter camps on the edge of the city. Their tin-roofed shacks had collapsed. We saw them on TV, knee deep in mud, carrying their few possessions to higher ground. Sewage overflowed the culverts. It is too much, they said.
On campus, rain flooded the classrooms and the first floor dormitory rooms. Awakened by the sound of rushing water in the middle of the night, our students grabbed their clothes and their books and scrambled to join their friends on the second floor. Rain pummeled the block of flats where we lived, and lightning sizzled through our phone line, destroying the modem of our computer. It is too much, we said.
It was March, and still the rain continued. We turned on our TV at eight o’clock to watch the evening news. The road to the airport was flooded, said the reporter. Next, film footage of a river in town, not far from our campus. It was the river where we’d seen the plastic bags and the soda cans and the broken beer bottles. Sludgy water seethed and surged over the banks. Suddenly, we saw a woman’s head bobbing up and down and a frantically waving arm. Farther and farther down the river she coursed, past shops and apartments, and under a bridge. Horrified, we watched as the angry river swallowed her. “Why was the cameraman filming her, and not saving her?” we asked each other.
It was May. Term holiday. We had booked a few nights at a guest lodge in the Kalahari Desert. We drove down from the highlands. On the plains, we saw waist-high grass growing where we’d never seen grass before. Fat, baby warthogs played hide-and-seek along the roadside, and we slowed to give right-of-way to a family of guinea fowl. From atop huge boulders, hefty baboons glared at us like angry traffic cops. After two hours, the grass and the brush gave way to a moonscape of rocks and gravel. The only wildlife was the occasional ostrich pecking for a pebbly lunch. As we entered the desert, haughty giant aloes (aloe arborescens) thrust their brilliant orange blossoms skyward. Tiny yellow and lavender flowers blanketed the Kalahari sands.
At dinner that night, we asked our hosts at the lodge, “Do these flowers always bloom in the desert?”
“No, only when the rain is sufficient. The seeds lie dormant in the sand – sometimes for ten years, sometimes for a lifetime. Then, with a good rainy season, they will bloom.”
Was it a too-much rainy season? It depends. If you were a warthog or a baboon or a tiny desert flower, maybe too much was just enough.