"Who would have thought I’d miss the rain?"

... said Scott, a few minutes after the skies opened up and let down some rain, the first we’d seen in about three weeks. It started out innocently enough; Thabit even called it a drizzle. But by the time I had to teach class, it was an official downpour and extremely windy. With windows opened in the classroom, the weather caused a racket. One student even said, "Teacher, it’s raining. We can’t hear you."

Everyone was in a frenzy. My usual orderly Form one students were buzzing with energy. I kept hearing whispers of, "My God." It was indeed noisy. I had to yell over Mother Nature, who was coming in loud and clear. She was also being felt. Rain poured in through the bottom of the classroom door. The students in the back had to move forward because they were getting sprayed.

It was the strongest storm I’d ever experienced. By the time I was done explaining direct objects, indirect objects, and complements, the rain had returned to a drizzle. But the air had been affected, the heat had lifted, and the ground had turned to clay. Brown clay that got tracked in and out of the classrooms, that stuck to the students’ shoes like chunky frosting. Which meant there could be no after-school sports for fear of ruining the dirt sport pitches.

We put the boys in one classroom and the girls in another. The female students were expecting a guest speaker on life skills, but the woman never arrived, probably due to the torrential storm. So I spent the next forty minutes talking to a group of teenage Tanzanian girls about sex and condoms and HIV and their period. I answered questions like, "Can you get pregnant after doing sex only once?" "If I don’t do sex for a long time, will I turn into a sugar mama?" "Isn’t it true that if you do sex seven days after your period ends, you won’t get pregnant," and "If I wait too long to do sex, will my vagina turn hard?"

I know – "do sex." Don’t worry, I corrected their English. I also answered their questions as best as I could with the knowledge I’ve been equipped with. I also wrote words on the whiteboard – lawyer, doctor, journalist, engineer, President, teacher, nurse, electrician – things that each of the girls said they wanted to become, their goals.