The rains are a big deal in Yumbe district. They generally come twice per year. One is called the long rains and is followed by the short rains a few months later. The key is to determine when the rains are coming.
If you plant your maze too early, it will not get the water at the right times. However, wait too long and you miss it the other way around. I could never really figure out how everyone seemed to know exactly which rain signified the actual start. It would rain one afternoon and I would ask Abassi our house manager, “have the rains started?” He always answered with a “no, these are not the rains”. Then one day he told me that these were the rains.
Whenever they really started, they came down hard. We moved into our house in Arua during the dry season. We thought it was really odd, because there were amazingly large gutters running around the house and through the compound. These were two to three feet deep and about the same wide. Here we are in the middle of the desert and we need gutters like that???
As you see in the picture, yes, we did need the huge gutters. The rain would come down so hard that my daughter and a family friend washed their hair in the down poor! It would fill the gutters with fast flowing rapids. Then, after an hour or so, it would stop. A hot dry wind would blow in and the equatorial sun would dry everything. In another hour, you wouldn’t know that it had rained at all.
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