Rainy season

It is raining here in Monrovia. As those of you who have travelled with me know, I tend to be a bit of a talisman when it comes to rain. I have brought torrential downpours to the deserts of New Mexico and Dubai, to the South African high veldt I the dry season and to Provence in July. On one trip to Hong Kong it rained from the moment my plane touched down until I left six days later, only to resume for the 90 minutes I was in transit from The Philippines on the way back from a rain-soaked island break.

But in all my years, in all my travels, I have never experienced rain like the rain that is falling here. Not that I am claiming responsibility for this precipitation. On the contrary, this rain is on schedule. The rainy season officially started here on 15 April and will continue for the next six months, although there is normally a lull in the second half of August (hence my relatively dry visit last time around). This isn’t the kind of rainy season you get in some parts of the world when it rains for a couple of hours at around the same time every day and that’s that. Oh no. Here the skies empty at any time and the sheets of water pelt down for hours, sometimes days at a time. Very little can be heard above the it, it muffles all sound. To put it in perspective Liberia gets more rain in a single month than we do in an entire year in the UK. That they manage to get any kind of infrastructure work done in these conditions is simply amazing. But somehow they do. What has struck me since I was last here is how much better the roads are. There are also many more businesses open, more restaurants and supermarkets and more airlines flying here – Air France started flights from Paris last week. The country is poor, very poor but it is slowly but surely rebuilding itself after years of brutal civil war. And people are cheery in spite of the rain.

If ever you are in West Africa during the rains, it is worth knowing:

1. it is still hot - locals will tell you otherwise and shiver in jackets and sweaters but for those of us more used to northern Europe it is hot, hot, hot

2. there is no point wearing any make up as it melts off your face

3. don’t wear suede or fabric shoes

4. on the plus side you can go easy on the moisturiser

5. no matter how much you think you have dried your hair, you haven’t and don’t even get me started on managing the frizz