When our plane touched down in Banjul, it was the dry season. Everywhere we went, the same red dust blew in the wind. The dust blew into our eyes, our mouths, our clothes. Dry heat caused us to drip with sweat, fanning ourselves and moaning, "it's so hot." In the heat of the day, we sat inside and under trees, sipping bags of water and eying the parched earth with sympathy.

Last night, it rained. It rained with a vengeance. At 3 AM, I woke to the sound of it. Our curtains were not waving in the breeze as they usually do. They were thrashing. Our room was lit every now and then by lightning. The thunder began before the lightning even stopped, refusing to take turns the way polite storms should.

We were all awake, of course. We wandered into the hall in our nightclothes with flashlights and back-lit watches. We gathered in the growing puddles in the hall to gaze out the windows at The Gambia outside, suddenly drenched and foreign. My Gambia was dry. I do not know this Gambia.