OMG Rain!

Today during class, the sky began to get dark and unleashed a furious flood of torrential rain for the first time after weeks of completely dry weather. When class was over, we went out to the corridor to watch the rain. It was without a doubt the most intense rainfall I've ever seen.

The class we were in was a USAC provided class so it was just a few of us stranded in the History Department, about a mile's walk from ISH(I). Tim, a fellow USAC student, and I decided to make a mad dash through the rain to the bookshop to buy umbrellas for the girls who stuck at the History Department with us. The bookshop was only a few hundred yards away so it seemed like a reasonable idea.

I stood in the doorway to stretch for my sprint then took a deep breath. I took off into the rain, attempting to run in flip flops. The stairs leading to the street had turned into a waterfall, the parking lot into a lake and the gutters overflowed to form rivers on the streets. Yes, the gutters that can be seen in my pictures (2-3 feet deep at least) were overflowing. Running through the rivers of roadway I felt like Dennis Nedry during his encounter with the Dilophosaur in Jurassic Park.

When we finally made it into the library, we were greeted by numerous snickering Ghanaians who must have been amused by the stupid Americans who were dumb enough to get caught in the tropical rainstorm. After dripping our way to the back of the library we discovered that umbrellas were 20GHC (~$13) each, which was beyond what it was worth to us at that point. Our friends back at the History Department hailed a cab to get back to ISH and Tim and I remained stranded at the bookshop waiting under the overhanging roof for the rain to stop.

We waited for over half an hour with numerous other patient observers of the storm until it finally let up and allowed for a semi-pleasant walk back to the hostel.

The University seemed like a whole new wold after the rain. There were tiny frogs sitting around the gutters and miniature streams of red-orange water carved their way through the previously dusty fields. The world, which the rain had put on pause for over an hour, resumed once more.