Just add water!

“It’s like a little miracle,” said Carl, our friend from Canada who has been teaching in the Philosophy department for the past year. Just watch, he said: When you get a rain after one of the prolonged parched spells like we’ve been having, the fields will explode in flowers.

That was hard to imagine. As Theresa mentioned in an earlier post, the most notable thing about the fields and trees when we returned after Christmas was how reddish brown everything is, covered with a thick level of bone-dry dust.

But then the other day it did rain, not for long but very hard. The car was suddenly clean; the air was refreshed; the sun was a more normal color at sunset, and you could actually see things in the distance that had previously been lost in a deep haze.

And two days later, the miracle happened. Everywhere we looked – out our kitchen window, on the walk to the pool, up the hill toward the administration building – there were patches of gorgeously delicate little white flowers, sticking their heads up, pointing toward the sky, waving in the breezes. Where could they have been hiding? What did they think as they emerged from the rock-hard soil into the blazing sun?

That’s not all, either: along with the clumps of flowers came an explosion of fat moths. Where had THEY been gestating, and in what form? There are hundreds and hundreds of them, under trees and clustered in corners of the building and flying madly all around. At least there were hundreds – the snowy white egrets think the moths are a good development, and they’ve been wandering around the yard, their long necks darting forward occasionally as they snag another one. Crunch.

Our friend and sometimes driver Gabriel tells us that egrets aren’t the only ones: people capture the moths in buckets (not very smart moths, but then, they haven’t been alive long enough to learn anything), remove their wings and eat them – just like with grasshoppers in Uganda, but not in such large quantities (we haven’t seen them for sale on the street, for example), and I think I’ll pass on this delicacy.

The flowers in the fields…the moths in the air: it’s one more reminder that although we don’t have the same sharply defined, months-long seasons here that we do at home, there are seasons nonetheless. They are just short, and – no surprise! – very, very intense. Blink, and you miss them.