April and May are the hottest months in the Sahel : temperatures during daytime peak beyond the 45°C mark, and don't cool down much during the night. Rivers dry out, water retention basins empty, the air fills with dust, especially on those days when the hot Saharan Harmattan winds reduce visibility to a few hundred meters.
Temperatures in our house don't drop below 35°C at any given time - still relatively cool when it's 45°C outside. But hot enough for toothpaste to liquefy, butter to melt within minutes, food to go bad if left overnight on the kitchen table, computers to overheat. Fortunately, air-conditioning has been invented, as well as generators - power outages are frequent at this time of the year. Unfortunately, air-conditioning uses a lot of energy, which induces a large electricity-bill, and a measure of bad conscience because we know it's produced by burning fossile fuels... Hence our efforts to only use aircon sparingly - but let's be frank : without aircon, we wouldn't sleep much and turn into zombies soon.
The heat is on everybody's mind these days. Even people who spend their entire day in airconditioned buildings, cars and homes complain. It is also common to blame mistakes, missed appointments, general fatigue etc. on the heat : « it must be the heat ». When you meet some one, it is customary in Burkina to chat a bit before getting down to business : how are you, and the family, and your health (especially if your interlocutor is an elderly person) ? During this period of the year, you have to also ask about the heat : « et la chaleur » ?
Speaking about airconditioning, you have to be aware that only a tiny fraction of the population has access to electricity. Only a tiny fraction of those has the means to pay the bills produced by running an aircon. Most Ouaga inhabitants sleep outdoors during this time of the year, spreading their mats in their small courtyards, hoping for a little breeze during the night.
Slowly now, the talk switches from the heat to the much-expected rains. Everybody makes more or less educated guesses on when they will start. Our security guard makes the most fantastic ones, predicting rain showers for a specific time of the day (never happens) ; the cook, a smart man in his fifties, limits himself to weekly predictions. Modern technology (weather radar) tells us the rains are on their way indeed, coming up from the South.
Obviously, soon after they set in, we'll start complaining about the rains : the mud, the ruined shoes, the leaky roofs, the overflowing canals, the invisible potholes, etc. We'll cover that in our next post !!
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