Holy Hotness!

"safari"

"out with friends"

It’s hot over here! Alexandra Fuller says it better than I can. The following is an excerpt from a book I recently finished by Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat - Travels with an African Soldier. She is describing the weather in the month of October in Zambia. Zambia and Katima Mulilo, Namibia are likening to the distance of Rochester and Buffalo in New York - so her description is right on:

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I’d forgotten how October eats at the landscape in the high lowveldt. It is the most discouraging time of year: long enough after the last rains so that they are barely worth the ache of remembering and too far until the next rains to waste the energy on hope. All signs of memorable excesses of ten months ago had disappeared and it was hard to believe that the same valley could accommodate such disparate worlds. The sky was cloudless but stained wildfire yellow and deep haze caught at the heat waves. Goats and donkeys stood with their backs to the sun and closed their eyes, panting (visibly rocking with every labored breath.) The ground around the villages was exposed, brick hard and grazed clean of vegetation.

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The Goba people say October is Gumiguru, meaning “month of the big ten”; November is the infinitely more hopeful Mbuzdi, meaning “month of goat fertility,” but October is big and ominous and obscurely ten. The Goba wisely avoid holding wedding and initiation ceremonies in October. White locals know it as suicide month. The Nyanja call it Mwenzi wa zuma, meaning “month of the sun”. They also call it Kusi piya (from kusi piya weka, “to kill yourself”). It is not a month to be toyed with.

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One might think that I should be happy for so much sun since Rochester is notoriously lacking in it. I suppose if I did not have to seek constant shelter from its rays and shower 2-3 times a day to wash the stink off my sweating body I might enjoy it. No amount of Gold Bond, baby powder, antiperspirant/deodorant, or talcum powder can compete with the amount of sweat that our bodies are generating from the heat in Namibia this time of year. Thank goodness we have electric so that we can run fans in the night while we sleep in our mosquito nets.