Dust and Rain in the Park

Take a moment to visualize your Monopoly game board, then completely fill the center with dirt.

Loose dirt.

Around the outside of the center, you can add all the short green, or are they red, one story houses you want, but make them the color of dirt.

Pale, loose dirt.

Take away the electric and water companies. They do no work and their owners have now been imprisioned.

You can keep one railroad.

I would imagine there are lots of jails, without the benefit of Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Last night, I concocted a sort of lazyboy chair in the front courtyard to watch the closest soccer game and to stay out in the cooler air.

Quite a breeze was blowing, a very dry breeze.

All of a sudden, the breeze picked up all the loose dirt on the fields and blew it in every which way. I could not see the players in the center of the field. Plastic bags were flying everywhere and you could hear children yelling.

Just as soon as it came it left, but the air had changed. Less dry, but definitely not humid.

I am assisting my neighbors in attaining information about their request for permission to live in Australia. In completing the form, they had electricity, I heard rain.

When you have not heard rain in a very ong time, you can recognize the sound of one drop.

Into their open space I went to await more drops.

I learned that when the rains come in July, it is not always welcomed.

After two or three days, the water is stagnant and cannot move off of low places, like the soccer fields. The air begins to smell. No drainage. This happens all over Khartoum.

I will be in Juba.

Returning to the chair, the game now over, no electricity, I can hear children playing in the dark. Similar, I would suppose to Hide n Seek. Lots of squeeling.

Conversations in the dark, moving as the speakers walk through the fields. Little fires appear, even though it is hot. A source of light. Dogs barking.

The cats come out at night in Khartoum. And Rascal can see or smell them all. They stand next to the fence and taunt her. She barks and growls, disturbing the silence.

As I look out over the square, there are florescent green lights that appear above the darken houses.

Mosques. Lots of them. On this board, they have replaced the high spired churches, their crosses illumined by night lighting.

Then, it rains, or showers.

I sit, my body relaxing, and my face smiling. In the dark.

God is Good.