rain in Pemba

It’s not the rainy season, but it rains nearly every day anyway. I’ve never been here during the long rainy season and I’m not sure I want to, with the heavy water running muddy and murky and toxic down the roads and ditches. Even in the cool, dry season that is now the water in the stream in the bottom of the valley emits a putrid smell and unearthly bluish glow and the houses nearest it are on the cheapest plots of land. The rain when it comes in this cool, dry season is quick and loud and weighty, pouring on the tin roof with a glorious sound that muffles conversation and is surprising every time. In Stone Town’s narrow stone streets, these rains create instant rivers of the walkways, with side streams feeding in from the alleys into the larger openings.

Boys playing soccer scatter to the higher ground of baraza and porch steps, under the awnings, to wait it out, because they never last long, these rains. Juma was caught on the wrong side of the street-turned-river on one of his first days in Stone Town when he was three, stuck crying under a tin awning as the rain made a noise too loud for his little heart to handle, too far away from his mama, and he never quite forgave the rain and the tin roofs for that. A teenage boy looked and understood his desperation, hefted him up and raced him across the little river to me, both of them soaked by the falling water, and the teenager’s jeans soaked up to his knees from the street water.