Rain, rain

It's raining! I mean really raining - at least for several hours since first light when I woke to the sound of drips falling off the roof outside my bedroom. Sometimes there's a heavier pulse for a few minutes. Then the soft pattering on leaves and ground resumes.

Up till now there have been two sharp showers in parts of greater Kigali where I happen to have been – good for temporarily laying the dust but not much more. The air has been getting cooler after 5 or 6 weeks of unusual heat. People have been quietly confident that the rain was on its way, if rather late. Yesterday the gardening group at Gasharu church was planning to buy some fruit trees, so they could be planted as soon as possible to allow maximum root development before the dry, hot season begins in May.

Water drips off the roof along the outside of my window because there is no gutter. New public buildings are legally required to have gutters and cisterns. Few private homes collect rainwater, though I am seeing more cylindrical black plastic tanks elevated in gardens for storing water from the erratic mains supply.

'Why not capture some of the copious seasonal rainfall for watering to prolong the growing season?'
'The tanks are very expensive.'
'Is the price you pay for water from the mains supply stable?'
'No, it's increasing rapidly.'
'How soon would you recoup the price of a tank?'
'I'll have to think about that.'

On the drive with the family to visit the older son in his boarding school last Sunday, we passed the new reservoir at the head of a valley beyond Gitarama. Below it a couple of miles of land, once boggy but subsequently drained like most of Rwanda's marshes, is bright green with irrigated rice. This is not a huge project, but it's beyond the capacity of a single district.

At the other end of the scale, I have recently seen in several compounds a makeshift water store, sometimes in a pit, made of plastic sheeting, supported with wooden staves and covered for protection from leaves and other debris. A single gutter on one side of a roof channels plenty of water in a heavy rainfall. In Gaudence's family we used this source for washing clothes and vegetables, for cooking, and for flushing toilets, as well as watering the garden.

At Gitarama, when the women say their sacks have dried up in the recent heat, I ask whether any of them store rainwater. That's all very well if you have your own compound, they say. Otherwise people come and steal the water in the night so it's not worth the effort. What would it take, I wonder later, to reach a critical mass where there were so many small supplies that the amount stolen from any one became insignificant?