When Does It Rain Here?

By Rose Wanjiku

I first arrived in Berlin a while back, and I still ask one of my friends, “When does it rain here?”

Talking about rain or the health of the land is often the icebreaker during long-distance calls with my family, especially my mother and sister. A general family welfare check always includes updates about the farm animals and crops. When I call my sister, her stories about how the maize is doing, how big one of the calves has grown, or how many chickens have hatched, truly warm my heart.

When it hasn’t rained for a long time, I can feel the pain in her voice. She worries that with a failed crop, she won’t be able to afford food at the local market. She agonises over the possibility that her family may have to take “dry breakfast.” That means tea without milk, or the occasional sweet potatoes or arrowroots; foods that reflect the abundance of the land when things are good.

She laments that her last roasted maize was during the last harvest, which should have been in June or July, but the rains came late and were too light. It is now August, and she groans at the thought of how expensive one cob of maize has become. She jokes that she’s only reading about roasted maize in newspapers. In our context, “reading about it in the newspapers” means something is rare, out of reach; almost like a fairy tale.

We often talk about how life has changed, adding humorously, “wazee hukumbuka”—”the old folks remember.” This phrase often leads us into memories of the past, especially when the long rains, from March to May, are delayed. For her, and for almost all Kenyans who rely on their land for food, these months are critical. It is the time when most food is planted. The short rains are in October and December.

My sister says she’s unsure whether the short rains will come. The long ones were too short and too light to soak the land well enough for food to grow. And now, if the short rains come, the ground will be too thirsty.

One day, a friend in Berlin overheard my phone call and said, “You know there’s something called Google Weather? That’ll tell you the outlook for the next months. That’s all you need.”

“No, I don’t want to Google it. I want to talk about it,” I replied. “It’s a real concern when it hasn’t rained at this time of year. People could die and…” I stopped myself before going off on her.

She didn’t notice my restraint. She continued: “Google Weather is based on real science.”

“Real science?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s precise and proven by science.”

By this point, my mouth was aching from holding back from arguing, but my sister had already hung up. She was off to look for water because the selling point near her home had broken down.

“You know, in Kenya, I could smell the rain. Here, I can’t. I don’t even know when it rains,” I told her.

“Smell the rain? How does it smell?”

“Like rain,” I said.

“Google it,” she told me.

“My grandmother didn’t Google it, and she knew. She taught me, and I knew it then and I did not Google it then,” I replied.

I could not explain further, but I suppose I inherited this ability by watching and listening to my grandmother. Hours before it rained, she would order my cousins and me to collect dry firewood and take the clothes off the hanging lines. It was nearly a capital offense to let firewood get wet. If the first drops of rain found firewood still outside, there was a household emergency. She would call all 11 grandchildren by name to remind us of the misfortune that would befall us if the firewood “caught water.” It was a crime to let firewood get wet.

Besides the smell of rain, my grandmother read the clouds, the birds, especially the swallows and even the animals. Each gave its own message about the coming rains, sometimes even their intensity.

Growing up in the village, one learnt this art or science of ‘reading the rain ‘. You learn to tell which clouds carry rain, and which ones will pass. You learn to name the “passing cloud” that brings only a drizzle. My grandmother called it “the scarer of lazy people.”

When you ran from the fields because of a passing drizzle, you were labelled lazy. “You’re not clay to melt in a few drops,” my grandmother would scold. During planting season, any excuse to leave the field was tempting, but rain was not a valid one. No one wanted to be branded “the village lazybone”.

The label of laziness could follow you even beyond the village. A distant aunt might suddenly decide not to invite you during harvest season, simply because she had heard whispers. Harvest season, especially in August, was a time when a visit to such an auntie came with responsibility: helping harvest maize and beans, which are labour-intensive crops. In our family, we created a “Harvest Fest”; a rotating effort where several families worked together on one another’s farms.

I think that’s why I had to learn to read the rain, not just for survival, but to be included. There was a sign and a story for every weather: rainbows, thunder, lightning. We believed thunder and lightning were signs of anger in the spiritual realm; heavenly beings expressing conflict. We believed this because we had heard stories of people struck by lightning and killed.

Today, my niece protests the ‘Harvest Fest’. She feels it is exploitative, especially since their generation is smaller. She rolls her eyes and says she cannot wait to go to college and leave it behind. I tell her things have changed and the harvests are smaller, the rains less reliable, the seasons confused.

I ask her if she knows how to smell the rain. She laughs.

“Are you for real?” she asks.

I tell her I am. Her mother and I could smell the rain. She says she cannot. Somehow, she does not understand why this makes me sad. She does not understand the despair in her mother’s voice when she talks about failed rains.

Here in Berlin, I still want to talk about rain. I still want to recognise its signs.

I still want to know: When does it rain here?

I don’t want to Google it.