We hurdle together on any verandah we can find, some with plastic bags on their heads. We are so close that we are content not to breathe, as long as no drop of water touches our skin. It’s worse when it is a taxi– all the air pathways are promptly sealed shut just because a drizzle has began.
And yet, when it rains, it feels like the heat in your clothes when you get back from work and dance care-less-ly in your sitting room because your jaw has been clenched so tightly since morning that you thought it had locked. You’re wet but warm at the same time.
As people whose access to water in secondary school was a privilege, and in some schools, at the height of ingenuity, the authorities turned the water off at the beginning of the term and let the taps loose on the day that we were going back home, being afraid of rain is a paradox.
Every day for three months, we lined our jerrycans in a winding jerrycan jam from the tap at the huge black tank, down the short flight of stairs and into the small compound to receive one drop every second, and yet we take refuge from water.
A girl was literally dragged through the trenches from the dormitory to the staff room for receiving chicken from her parents on visitation day, but we fear rain.
A teacher would rain blows on your back for sleeping in his class until you dropped from your desk – the desk with nails which popped out to scratch your skirt or bum- to the dusty patched cement floor; and we still fear drops of water.
Some people had their hair cut off in a malicious fashion (bigoli) on the day that they sat for their final paper in school, and we still hide from rain.
We were trained for difficulty; for Kony and his child soldiers, by people who lined up for sugar and salt, for systems that did not work, by people who saw their family get lost and were never seen again. We were trained for the ‘third world’- the mice that live under the sewers.
Can we at least dance in the rain?
PurplePretoria 