Oh never mind

In Canada we are fond of the expression: If you don’t like the weather just wait ten minutes.

That’s probably true for most temperate zones. But tropical and equatorial weather is different. Many places on the planet you can set your clock by the weather. For instance, every day at 5:00pm it may rain.

Ghana’s weather is equatorial. There are seasons — hot and wet, hot and dry. This is the hot, dry season.

It rained this afternoon.

Not a little sprinkle of water that disappears as soon as it hits the ground. This was a short but real downpour. I was on the tro-tro coming home from campus. So I didn’t get too wet — all the gaskets around the windows leaked.

But the tro-tro ride home is staged. In the middle, at Madina Market, we have to switch. This is done at a tro-tro station. Anna-Marie, rightly, points out there is something very Orwellian about a tro-tro station. A station is a compound, usually behind street front buildings. They are not paved, have only minimal order to them — I know which quadrant to head to for the tro-tro to Botwe, where we live. But then I have to start asking in anyone knows which tro-tro is going my way. And stations tend to have a separate entrance and exit. Plus there are tin speakers mounted on poles with destinations blasted over the crowd in such a complex of competing messages that none are really comprehendible. Count on the ground being covered with years of garbage.

This is not a place you want to visit when it is dry.

This is really not a place you want to visit when it is wet.

Most of the ground here is quite impervious to rain, staying hard and keeping its form, just letting the water run off. But not all the ground is like that. And when the surface is uneven and water pools, and when hundreds of trucks in a very short time stop and start, over and over again, the ground must give way.

So I carefully picked and danced my way across the yard to the area where the Botwe tro-tro is usually found, avoiding puddles, small lakes, slick inclines of mud — an oozy, red layer on top of a hard layer.

The ride home on this second leg takes about 20-25 minutes. Today it took that long to get out of the tro-tro station. Trucks were sliding about the yard. No driver was more courteous and less aggressive than usual. Two trucks decided to swim upstream, causing a lot of yelling, honking, and arm waving, and causing a great delay. My tro-tro ran into another with a pretty hefty force. Another outside my window did the same.

But finally we squeezed out the exit and sat on the main road through the Madina Market for another 15 minutes, creeping forward amidst a slightly heightened chaos.

But it rained today. And now the sky is clear, the haze washed away, and a cool breeze blowing across my yard. That the haze is gone will mean tomorrow it will be hotter, but by Wednesday the haze will be back, blocking out some of the heat of the sun.

And instead of the usual red glow that slowly turns to black, we have a real sunset, with blue sky above brilliant white clouds, fringed with red and orange, and rays of sunshine dispersing through them. 

So forget all that stuff I said about Mars.