The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

S TRANGE D AY 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 he clouds amassed on the horizon one day last year. A new member of the community noted they looked like rain clouds. No, was my response, they might look like rain clouds but they’ll never spill their contents here. Not in Africa. Not during the dry sea- son. I spoke with a certainty gained from too many years suffering the conti- nent’s predictable weather patterns. That’s what was so strange. So unusual. It did rain. The locals were a bit con- cerned. They tried to go about their business as if nothing unusual happened, but it was evident in their eyes and in the long pauses that marked their conversa- tions. The market didn’t matter to them that day. Selling their wares didn’t matter to them that day. It rained that day. That’s what mattered to them. It was the dry season, and in Africa that means no rain. But it rained. Strange. I remember the day well. Perhaps because of what happened to Ebrima that day, or maybe it was because of the butterflies. When it began to rain, I was sitting on my front porch reading. My little bungalow sat one block in from the main road leading into the capital. The main road was paved. My road was sand in the best of times and mud in the worst. During the dry season, everything was covered in a thick layer of fine dust kicked up from the road, or blown in from the Sahel. The normally vibrant African colors were dulled by the rusty-brown film of dust, and the bright hot sun further bleached everything in sight. I was engrossed in my book and only afterward would I remember that everything around me had stilled. The usual cacophony that is urban Africa — the street vendors, the greetings of passersby, the cluck of chickens, the bleating of goats, the sputter of poorly- tuned combustion engines, pied crows cawing from rooftops, the grinding and grating and squealing of bearings in need of lubricant, the regular schwok-schwok sound of a machete being used to trim bushes and cut back the tall grass, and, yes, the incessant chorus of insects — fell away. I was less aware of the sudden lack of noise than I was of the sound of the wind playing through the fronds of the palms and the leaves of the hibiscus that sheltered my porch. It was a sound I usu- ally only listened to in the F O C U S O N F S F I C T I O N T A MAN REALIZES THE RHYTHM OF LIFE AND DEATH IN A RAINSTORM IN A FRICA . B Y M ICHAEL E. K ELLY Donald Mulligan