April is the cruelest month...
...but it doesn't have anything to do with Eliot or Chaucer. It's just flippin' hot outside. Since April is the hottest month of dry season and given that the second most common question I get (behind “How are you? Sick?”) is, “So, is it really hot?”, I will attempt to answer that question.
Umm… yes.
Until about mid-March it hadn’t been too bad - hot, but not REALLY hot. Unfortunately for... everyone in Mali (minus that one guy who sells ice), dry season is in full swing. Hot dry season, I should say. Mali has two seasons: rainy and dry, with dry season being subcategorized into hot and cold. We arrived in country in July - in the middle of the rains, which provide almost daily relief from the heat. Not too bad. But besides some freak sprinkles around the first of December, it hasn’t rained since Halloween. Novemberish through Februaryish is referred to as “cold” dry season. The quotation marks are warranted. There was a list in a recent Mali Rag with the observation, "You know you're a Mali PCV when you reach for your sweatshirt if the temp drops below 80. "Cold" is anywhere between 60 and 80. Anything below that would be better described as "frigid", at least in the southeast. Believe it or not, 80 does seem pretty cool after you've been here a while. There were nights in Bamako in January that must've been in the 50s, and it was FREEZING, even to me. Now we sit around the San stage house pining for those chilly nights.
Umm… yes.
Until about mid-March it hadn’t been too bad - hot, but not REALLY hot. Unfortunately for... everyone in Mali (minus that one guy who sells ice), dry season is in full swing. Hot dry season, I should say. Mali has two seasons: rainy and dry, with dry season being subcategorized into hot and cold. We arrived in country in July - in the middle of the rains, which provide almost daily relief from the heat. Not too bad. But besides some freak sprinkles around the first of December, it hasn’t rained since Halloween. Novemberish through Februaryish is referred to as “cold” dry season. The quotation marks are warranted. There was a list in a recent Mali Rag with the observation, "You know you're a Mali PCV when you reach for your sweatshirt if the temp drops below 80. "Cold" is anywhere between 60 and 80. Anything below that would be better described as "frigid", at least in the southeast. Believe it or not, 80 does seem pretty cool after you've been here a while. There were nights in Bamako in January that must've been in the 50s, and it was FREEZING, even to me. Now we sit around the San stage house pining for those chilly nights.
I don't have an accurate source for temperatures at my site (oddly, The Weather Channel doesn't cover Kimparana and most PCVs' thermometers have gone haywire - mine often reads 118) but I can say with confidence that it is over 100 every single day. The news said yesterday it was 109 in a town near me. Some people back in Ameriki say, "Oh, that's not so bad. I live in Florida and it's been 105." Yeah, but what people in Ameriki forget is that in Ameriki you can escape the heat easily - in your air conditioned home, office, car, restaurant, bank, etc. You can get some ice cream. You can buy a cold beverage. You can plug in a fan. Malila you're lucky to have some big trees in your courtyard. It's not that experiencing 109 is unbearable. It's that experiencing 109 from 9 AM to 5 PM with no reprieve is pretty harsh. And it's hotter INSIDE than it is OUTSIDE. Apparently I'm the only one who's noticed that the houses are made of the same material as the OVENS, for the sake of Pete. It's almost impossible to sleep (who's ever thought I could say something like that?) indoors, so everyone camps outside in the courtyard every night. I'm assuming this will go on until it starts raining again and we're forced back into our mud ovens. You'd think the coming of the rains would be a sorely anticipated event. I'm not so sure. Even if it did start raining now, I’m told that the beginning of rainy season is almost worse than regular hot season. Because it’s hot AND humid. At lest that's something a Southern girl should be used to.
And to conclude, I give you a photo of the lush Malian countryside during dry season:
* For Arielle.
1 commentaire:
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