Call Me Red

In Rwanda, the dry season is really, really dry. Everything is utterly dried out, and parched. The only plants that survive without being regularly watered are hardy species that can withstand months of not receiving any water at all. Purple hearts like we have in the greenhouse at school grow everywhere. I know from experience just how stubbornly they cling to life in the face of neglect and prolonged drought.

During the dry season soil on the ground dries up too, and then gets picked up on the slightest breeze and coats everything in a reddish dusty coating.

There was never such a thing as a clear day in Kigali: the air pollution is quite pronounced. Some of this air pollution is caused by smoke from cooking fires, some from cars (with 007-like smoke screens pouring out of their exhausts) and quite a bit of it is from the soil blowing through the air.

Even the simple action of walking, or driving, created enough of an air current to lift the dust from the ground into the air, where it would be breathed in, where it would cling to your skin, your hair and your clothes.

I noticed on the morning of the second day in Kigali, as I was making my bed, that my pillow had a reddish, suspiciously head-sized mark right in the middle of it. Hmm I thought. The next morning, the mark was more pronounced. I realized that my hair must have had enough dust in it to leave a mark on my pillow. When I washed my face in the evening, my facecloth came away all orangey-red. When I was washing my shirts (ok, Linda did the washing) the water turned reddish-orange after just one shirt. One of my white Lands’ End polo shirts still has a definite orange-y tinge to it.

Arial photographs of Kigali (the capital city) on Google reveal very little variation in colour: everything in the city is covered with this dust. As we were driving along in the country-side, past banana plantations I remarked to Linda that I did not see how the trees closest to the road could survive, coated, as they were, with a significant blanket of red dust.

My socks were covered in the red dust by the end of each day, my hat had red dust stains around the sweat band, and my shoes still have red dust stains on them. You step outside for five minutes, and you have red dust on your clothes.

The lucky thing was that the country was so dry and cat-free, I had zero symptoms of asthma the whole time I was there.