No Hurry in Africa by Brendan Clerkin

was a sign that rain was on its way. These dust devils, harbingers of rain or not, always stole my khaki hat.
    In the end, the predictions of rain were proved right. Kitui’s long rainy season belatedly got going in the middle of November. The whole place changed from dusty red to verdant green within a few days. I was amazed by this miraculous transformation. Wild seedlings suddenly punched through the crusty ground. Crops began to shoot and sprout. Leaves appeared all over plants that had seemed long dead. Families were busy ploughing their fields with oxen. My tentative weekend travel plans to other parts of Kenya were put on hold, because the rains made many of the dirt roads impassable at times. Some of these roads now had three-foot-deep gorges running down the middle of them. Each night there were apocalyptic lightning storms that illuminated the entire sky for hours on end, accompanied by monsoon force rains drumming menacingly on the tin roof of our house.
    The rainy season in Kitui means there are heavy showers at night, with thirty degrees Celsius in the sunny daytime. I have never seen faces of people so happy to see a drop of rain when it finally did arrive; workers in Nyumbani started dancing elatedly outside under the monsoon showers, thrilled that finally it was raining.
    But the rains always bring tragedy as well as joy in Kitui; they are simultaneously a blessing and a curse. Disease increases, Kitui village loses its electricity, and phone lines are down for weeks; roads are impassable whether you are driving, cycling or even walking. Several bridges in the district were washed away. Mwangangi and Kimanze told me of several incidents of locals perishing while attempting to ford the torrents that the dry rivers had developed into in that particular rainy season. It was later reported that over sixty people had drowned around Kitui. Some incidents were heartbreaking. Some children near Kwa Vonza drowned after wading out to rescue other children coming back from school.
    ‘Many drownings are simply put down to witchcraft and curses,’ Nancy informed me one day at our desk.
    Then, after a week, the rainy season ended abruptly, stopping as early as it started late. It was followed by what I can only describe as a biblical plague of insects. Fortunately, all expired after about two days. Children would sit after dark on the roadsides with paraffin lamps catching ‘sausage flies,’ which they fried as a tasty protein-filled treat. However, with the early cessation of the rains, the long-term problem of drought and famine would remain a problem for the foreseeable future.
    Around Nyumbani, the rains had also brought a lot of sickness. When I greeted Mwangangi and enquired how he was, he replied in his own distinctive English idiom,
    ‘I am very fine, and I am very sick with malaria’—all of this in the one sentence. He added, ‘The mosquitoes were boozing (i.e. buzzing!) in my home last night.’
    I pictured the mosquitoes having a few pints with him. The rains had brought the mosquitoes, of course, and with the mosquitoes came malaria. I was one of the very few to avoid malaria, because I was still taking tablets faithfully every day to prevent it—just as I had promised my mother!
    ‘Malaria swells all your internal organs, it feels about four times as bad as flu, and leaves you bedridden for over a week at least,’ was how Mutinda put it.
    It fell within the realm of his medical expertise.
    ‘It has to be treated early, and can be fatal if left untreated. The problem is, the initial symptoms are tiredness, a cough, and just about the exact same run of the mill symptoms as the common cold, the flu and a lot of other ailments.’
    When I was in Kenya, one of Arsenal’s players contracted malaria while on international duty in Africa. It was reported that all the other Arsenal players carefully avoided him on his return. That malaria is contagious is a common misconception; it is spread only by