Lightning

Salut!

It all starts with a clear, still night. Nothing moves for fear of creating even more heat, more sweat, and less sleep. The stars are such as can be appreciated only by one who lives with no electricity in a likewise unlit village on the African plain. The only things daring to break the stillness and silence are the ever-present, malaria carrying Anopheles mosquitoes...they never sleep, nor slumber.

I feel something crawling down the back of my leg. I slap at it only to discover a rivulet of sweat. I drift in and out of a feverish dream. Then, it starts.

A gust, a flutter of the curtains, a rustle of leaves. A flickering on the horizon like a fluorescent light bulb on its last legs. A muffled roar growing louder by the second leading to an explosion of curtains shooting out like billowing robes of an Arab fleeing on his camel. Somewhere in the dark a rooster scurries off with a squawk half caught in his throat.

I turn on my sweat soaked pillow; my body begging to be touched by even a wisp of that cooling breeze. A pitter-patter starts on the tin roof. The sent of a moss-filled rainforest drifts in on winds dropping sharply in temperature. The pitch black night continues to be broken by nature's strobe light.

Suddenly, all silence is drowned in thunderous applause as a million shimmering liquid bullets pound out their cadence overhead and all around.

The stars are gone in a billowy mass of tumbling clouds with now a constant flickering of lightning illuminating the shadows of the naked limbs of the trees performing their yoga at breakneck speed as they are thrashed about in the torrent. An occasional flash blinds the eyes followed by the sharp crack and rumble of a bolt hitting close to home. The inside of the mosquito net becomes a spider's web filled with shadowy forms flitting back and forth across the walls and ceilings of this bomb shelter as the "rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air" make sleep neither possible nor desired.

The next few days bring a flood of change across the landscape of Bere as people melt away from the hospital and stream to the fields. Horses and cows appear out of nowhere attached to locally fashioned plows. Rows upon rows of freshly turned soil mark out their measured lines in between, around, and almost in the mud huts. Pigs grunt in contentment contributing to the tilling of the soil in their ceaseless search for earthworms. Other porkers lounge lazily in the mud puddles newly formed in the middle of the main road. Soon, the roads will be a thing of the past...

The rainy season has started...

James