Rainy Season

There are three distinct seasons in Mali: hot, cold and rainy. Hot season is an agonizing torture. It is the time when the entire countryside shuts down, reduced to hiding from the sun and napping for most of the daylight hours. Cold season is a misnomer. It has nothing to do with our normal understanding of the word “cold” but is merely a reference to our new understanding of the word “hot”, redefined during the previous hot season. Cold season might be renamed “sleep season”, as it is the only time it is truly comfortable to do this at night. The rainy season is a mixture of the two, hot days and relatively pleasant nights except, here’s the catch, everything is damp and covered in red mud.

Rain in Mali is an intimidating experience in itself. It is rarely the gentle New England rains that come in and patter all day, silently renewing the landscape with life giving moisture. There is none of this rainy day spent relaxing with a book curled up on the couch which you have in your mind’s eye. African rains are as chaotic as everything else here. Anyone who has ever been in a thunderstorm on a mountaintop knows the feeling. Typically coming out of nowhere, a blast of wind announces that you have mere seconds to find shelter before all hell will break loose. The first crack of thunder, originating from somewhere approximately ten feet from your ears, indicates that your scramble for cover has been much too slow. The sky opens up, the water hits the ground far too fast to be absorbed and it all starts heading downhill toward the river (directly through our neighborhood) taking everything imaginable from trash to dead animals to small children right along with it.


Currently, we are at the tail end of the rainy season. This is a monsoonal flow which typically lasts for three to four months (we are definitely on the long end of that estimate in Bamako this year). It does not necessarily bring rain every day, just most of them. It is hard to explain the disgustingness of a rainstorm here to anyone who grew up in Europe or America. The roads are already kept muddy year round by the human and animal waste flowing freely down them (you never fully appreciate pavement until faced with this situation) but add to that the rains of rainy season and it’s especially repulsive.

Picture a land without trash collection. Where anything one throws out literally ends up in the streets just outside one’s home. Picture a land where all toilets flush into those same streets. O.k., don’t picture toilets per se but picture all pee produced by a household leaving that house through a shallow trench dug to channel liquids under the concession wall and out into the street. While this may take away the urine of any given household, it simply joins it to the larger pee stream from other houses. Everybody lives downstream from somebody. “My pee flows by your house and your pee flows by my house, the more we get together the happier we’ll be…” Sure, here in Bamako there are some sewers on the main roads but not everywhere. It is an open sewer system (literally, you can easily fall in if you are not paying attention) and serves more as a rodents highway than to alleviate any sewage issues. Smells great, too.


Our neighborhood is in a low-lying area of town just next to the Niger river. This means that it floods out with even the slightest rains. Daily we are forced to jump from one little muddy island to the next in an effort to get out of our house (see: first picture) without having to wade through the sewer water running through the streets. We wish it could be said that we were always successful but that would be lying. Some days the rain comes so hard that we are utterly cut off. The only way out is to roll up the pant legs (we never wear shorts here, that is far too risqué) and wade out across the temporary lakes of vile sludge.

One morning Mark was wading along knee deep through a main street of Bamako, drinking yogurt from a plastic bag and thinking, “Well, this can’t get much more surreal,” only to be passed by not one but two dogpaddling rats (cue the carnival music). Another time he and a cabbie marveled at the temporary fast flowing river they were plowing through so deep the water seeped in the doors of the taxi when a moto rode by (feet up on the handlebars to avoid dragging in the water) and sent a cascade of filth in through the window all over them. No reaction. The window was silently rolled up and they stared straight ahead for the rest of the ride, neither wanting to mention the horror they had just experienced.

(A woman wading across what had been a road and soccer field mere hours, minutes actually, earlier - in fact, all these photos were taken within hours of each other. The first one is our front door.)