The dry season in Uganda lasts from early December until around late February. These are the hottest months, because of the scorching sun and the dry wind that blows from the Sahara Desert. Yet it’s always cold in the mornings and evenings. I honestly don’t know how it can get so cold at night, and yet during the day it can be so hot.
I grew up in a neighborhood east of Kalongo town, which was already an urban center by then. As kids growing up, there were several games we liked to play to spend time with one another, especially on weekends when we didn’t have to go to school but rather spent time at home, helping our parents with house chores. We would play games like football after we finished our chores.
When it rained, we would sometimes just play around in the rain, and then bathe in it as it fell. We did this because of the scarcity of water in the region. In the dry season, wells and streams dry up, and sometimes even shallow boreholes too. So we had to fetch water from the deeper boreholes that were over five kilometers away. Which was kind of fun but also exhausting because of the distance, and the boreholes were often very crowded then, so it would take like two hours to get the chance to pump a jerrycan of water.
When the dry season ends, everyone gets excited for the rain to come, because it replenishes the dried-up wells, streams, and shallow boreholes, and no one has to travel long distances to fetch water anymore. Instead, when it’s raining, we can collect the water that runs off the roofs.
One Saturday afternoon, the clouds came from nowhere. It was around 2 p.m., and the sun was scorching. Suddenly it started raining heavily, and one of my best friends from the neighborhood, Kamilo, came running to my house, shouting, ‘Thomas! Thomas! Kot dong tye ka cwee’, which means ‘it’s raining’. I was in our grass-thatched kitchen, eating lunch. My mum had cooked rice and beans since they were my favorites.
I stopped eating the moment I heard Kamilo shouting my name. It’s hard to tell if it’s raining when you’re in a grass-thatched house because rain falling on the roof doesn’t make a sound, unlike when it falls on mabati, or corrugated iron sheeting. I jumped up with excitement. Kamilo was standing in front of our door. His clothes were already wet, and he was holding a green bucket for fetching water. I ran back inside and also grabbed a bucket so that we could play in the rain as well as fetch water for bathing later.
My uncle Ojok, who lived in the same compound, was rich because he was one of the chiefs in the parish. He had built a permanent house, and his veranda was lined with gutters for collecting rainwater from the roof. As soon as I got out of the house with my bucket, we ran to his house to collect water.
We placed our buckets under the overflowing gutter, and rainwater from the roof flowed through the collection pipe and into our buckets. We started jumping around in the rain and moving towards the roadside. Kamilo shouted, ‘Thomas, let’s remove our clothes’. As kids we didn’t mind being almost nude. We removed our shirts and shorts but kept our boxers on, and, holding our clothes in our hands, we continued running towards the center of town where the markets were, because the roads there had tarmac, and the rain had stopped all traffic. How fun it was to have the road all to ourselves!
Unfortunately, it stopped raining out of the blue. The clouds parted and it became bright and sunny again. All this happened in less than ten minutes. We had just reached the market side of the road and were heading for the football pitch that was behind the market. The weather transition was so funny. People started coming outside. The people who had gone to buy food at the market all came out and started to walk to their respective homes.
It was so shameful running home half-naked, and to make matters worse we kept running into young girls who were coming from the market. Some of them were my schoolmates! I almost covered my face with the wet T-shirt I was still holding in my hands, but I wouldn’t see the way if I did that. Kamilo ran beside me while laughing, but to me it wasn’t fun any more, it was shameful because I am actually quite a bit older than him.
