The Rains Keep Coming
I look at the pictures in our flicker account and am reminded that last year the Zambezi river flooded. It was only a month ago as you can see from our last blog entries that we were in a drought and people worried about planting there crops. Well, in Moz it is always feast of famine and I am well aware of this since I am so connected with local farmers. They had to plant their corn two months too late and now it is raining too much. The corn, generally speaking, is growing well because we are having really hot humid days. As we say in Nebraska, you can almost see the corn grow on these days.

The downside to all this is there is flooding. Since Mozambicans do not have good irrigation systems they have to take advantage of low-lying areas that have good humidity, especially early in the planting season and late in the rainy season and early dry season when they can still take advantage of the area for a second season of corn. During the rainy season it is quite wet below and people use it to grow cane sugar and various vegetables like tomatoes, eggplant and pumpkin which they can sell for money in the market for family needs. The soil is rich, since it is a flood plain, and very deep so they get there best production there of corn and beans and other food crops for their families. They can also plant earlier in those sites so a farmer with a lowland area in his field is much better off than others who do not. However, these places flood. And flood they did. I spoke with a farmer yesterday who lost all of his cane sugar, tomatoes and corn and beans in the lowland because of flooding. He was quite shocked how much it flooded. Well, it is a flood plain and these things happen, but for a subsistence farmer, what can you do. This means big chunk of money lost to buy school supplies, clothes and food for the family. What do you do? You just tighten your belt and hope for next year.
We cannot say that climate change is causing the erratic rainfall patterns as Mozambique has always suffered from this and I do not have data to prove this. The only thing we know is that they say that the Zambezi River normally would flood once or twice every decade. Well the last decade it has flooded 4-5 times. If it floods this year it would be the last three years making it 4 out of the last 6 years. Climate change. Then again, reading the history of southern Africa it has always been an extremely difficult place to live. The people have adapted over centuries to be able to live here. So is this weather climate change, maybe? Is it Africa, definitely!