The first afternoon rain of the year is here and has brought with it sudden cool air that creates great gusts of wind the blow through the leaves of the many mango trees and swirl into my house perfumed and cool.  Though the wind is only maybe 80 degrees, it is such a contrast from the heat that it raises goosebumps on my skin and for a moment I wonder if I will shiver.

We are four months into the dry season, and until last night have seen only one real rain in that time.  It is the hottest of the hot time, before the rains have brought the wonderful cool air from the clouds but the sun is traversing back to the shine more heavily on the northern hemisphere, though we are so close to the equator that the difference is rather small.  People tell me that the rains won’t really be here for another two months, and when I hear that I conjure up fantastic monsoon storms to which your only response can be to sit near your open door and watch all the water falling from the sky.

I am lying on my recently purchased plastic woven mat because it is cooler on the concrete than on my bed.  When the rain started I laid aside my latest book, an essay on the alleviation of poverty, and put my arms under my head, listening to the sound of the drops hitting my tin roof and revelling in the coolness that I knew would shortly come.  It occurred to me suddenly then that I knew why the rains of Africa were spoken of so reverently, and yet were still shrouded in mystery.  The earth was baked dry for months in temperatures that oscillated only slightly from a 90 degree median, but though the vibrance of color slowly faded after the rains left (right about when I arrived in Guinea), it has remained essentially tropical.  Now the first daytime rain is here, and it has brought with it a sensuality and a rebirth that seems to wrap through the very dirt itself.  It is romantic in a way that is completely unexpected, as if new life is about to burst spontaneously from everywhere at once.

The adjusting process to Peace Corps service is somewhat like a thin layer of calm spread over volatile highs and lows.  These things are denser, and so the calm floats on them like oil on water.  But the surface tension of the calm is like that of water, and so it breaks easily on slight disturbances.  Maybe it is because of this state that this first rain was rousing enough to oust me from my mat to write about it, but regardless I am left for the first time with an understanding of how a person could fall in love with this land, and right now, in this moment, that is all I need to understand.