Rain

On the bus to Tamale, wedged between too many sweating bodies in stale, soft-rock ridden air, I am witnessing climate crisis happening.
The rainstorm yesterday was the official announcement of the second portion of the rainy season. The relentless torrential deluge drove us inside, pounding water in spurts and gushes through the hairline cracks between window panes. The Nalerigu dam had overflowed four days ago, fat and bursting from the steady, regular rains that came to East Mamprusi with me. Adding the punishment of a half-day's hurricane-volume lashing left miles of maize drowning in ugly, polluted runoff, and my fellow passengers gaping, scrambling over each other to see, muttering in Mampruli. The road to Walewale, ghastly even in the dry season, was transformed into kilometers of mud, four feet deep and sucking the tires of any vehicle heavier than a bicycle. Getting off the bus to lessen the load, we trudge through the mire, my Birkenstocks caked with mud upon reaching the bus again. Nasia township is flooded; the stretching fields of Savelugu district also under the swollen banks of the rivers and streams. Town after town has the steel-grey rain lapping threateningly at the edges of compounds, shimmering in cold ways in the breeze generated by more incoming clouds that three months ago were pregnant with promise and now breed only trouble.
The weather of mid-August is schizophrenic at best, shifting wildly from pounding heat to these desperate, sobbing rains, and back just as fast. It is only a pale preview of the emotional outburst expected from the clouds this coming September, rumoured to be a huge blow in an already decimating rainy season. The Burkina Faso government has decreed that it is only a matter of time before the re-opening of the dams to the north like last year, to once again save the savanna country by flooding the Ghanaian White Volta river. With the ground already so saturated, burdened with the water of the season thus far and the tears from last year's flood, the question gnawing at peoples' guts and minds is simple: Where will the water go?