A Bird in Bangladesh: The monsoon that almost wasn't...

I spent the entire month of May waiting for the monsoon to arrive. It was seriously the longest, hottest month I have ever lived through, with temperatures above 40 almost every day and dust, dust, dust, due to the dryness. So when the first rains arrived, while I was walking home without an umbrella of course, they left me completely soaked and extremely happy because the temperature was instantly lowered. However, the torrential rain, and flooding that often comes with it due to terrible infrastructure, that was expected never really came. We had rain, but not often, and not for very long and it kinda just went back to being hot again. Most disappointing! Someone was saying that Dhaka has its own little micro-climate because it is all concrete and things don't happen the same way they used to. no idea if that is correct but the rains definitely weren't as prolific as expected!

I never understood people getting excited about rain, even though I grew up in the country where farmers actually cared about rain, but it always was just a bit of an annoyance. Never have I wished for rain as much as I have here during the month of May. We had an entire assembly at school devoted to the monsoon where classes recited poems about the rainy season, because in this country, the rainy season really is a blessing, it is a gift from God after a few months of extreme heat and it is something that is really looked forward to.

We take so much for granted in life, but sometimes it is really good just to stop and find joy in the gifts that we are given in the form of rain, or maybe it’s a sunny day in the middle of winter, or a day that is under 30 degrees here and not so hot…

Anyway, enough philosophising, here are a few photos of the rainy season from the times where it actually did rain!