Rain rain go away
Go and come another day
Little children want to play
Rain, rain go away
A popular rhyme in my time; we sang it whenever it poured down and our parents called us back indoors. We would look out of the windows longingly, waiting impatiently for the rains to stop so we could go out to play in the open.
It’s that time of the year when our weather demands that we find our sweaters, raincoats, umbrellas and rainboots to face the downpour of rains that we’re experiencing. Yes, the rainy season is upon us, and may have caught many of us off guard; well, it did me! The rains seem torrential and unrelenting, with anything between 7-12 hours of downpour as some of us have experienced. The news via social and traditional media is laden with stories of people whose homes have been flooded, or have been stuck in traffic owing to some streets being flooded, rendering them completely unmotorable.
The floods have also caused some of our traders in the market eye-watering losses to their businesses, where their goods were completely soaked and no longer healthy for public consumption. Some schools could not have their normal sessions because the classrooms have no roofs, and so the rain will beat the teachers and students if classes were had. Other schools which are held outdoors (a.k.a. schools-under-trees) could not hold any sessions as the rains came down.
In many of our residential and business locations, when the rains come down, our lights go off for hours on end (note to self: Find out from ECG what the correlation is between the rains and our lights having to go off). Therefore, in such situations, people cannot work; in effect, as even using Wi-Fi in many cases, requires the use of electricity.
So…maybe…the rains should go away, after all. The rains seem to bring about nothing but ‘bad news’…? Or do they? Shall we look at the other side of the coin?
Matter of fact, I am one of those people who actually love rain…we’re called pluviophiles! Trust me to find a word for that, huh?! If the rainy season isn’t your favourite type of weather, remember that it’s more than an inconvenience — rain is necessary for human (and plant) life. The fresh water that rain provides is essential to the survival of every living thing including plants, animals and humans.
How do the foods we eat grow? By being fed with rainwater, preferably. Rainwater is ‘soft water’ compared to the treated water that runs through our taps or the one drilled from boreholes. Salts and chemicals build up in the soil over time and these residues are tough on food crops and plants. Rainwater helps flush these chemicals away and refresh the health of the soils.
Fresh water sources like rivers, ponds and streams can evaporate or get depleted as a result of human activity; now guess who comes to the rescue? RAIN!
I have held the personal belief that rainy days are God’s way of giving us an extra day off work or school; an extra day to recover from the tough life we sometimes are subjected to; and a rainy day has a way of keeping you in bed and catching those extra forty winks!
I have also often wondered, when I see the news of flooding in our major cities, whether the floods we experience are of natural causes or man-made. In a research document by Messrs. Henry Mensah of Brandenburg University of Technology and Divine Kwaku Ahadzie of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, their finding revealed that that poor urban planning and development (building houses in waterways and in ramsar sites, I’ll say), poor and inadequate drainage facilities (the big open gutters that become rubbish damps for any passer-by comes to mind ), poor environmental attitude (chopping down any and every tree in sight so we can build an innumerable-bedroom house to live in, clogging every open gutter and land space with polythene bags and empty sachet water packets are the main bane) and extreme rainfall (which we haven’t seen in decades, I’m gathering) are the top causes of urban floods in Ghana.
It reads to me as though the real problem is not the rain; it’s us – Ghanaians and our antisocial behaviour toward our environment and nature. And that’s beginning to cost us, and will continue to, unless we change. Where do we start the change from? Or should that rather be, are we willing to change?
