Spotty Rain

We’d expect this time of year to be the tail end of the rainy season here, but since the rains started late, there’s hope that they’ll continue stronger for another month. Unfortunately, the results have been pretty spotty this year, with a lot of rain in some places and not much in others. Perhaps this is not uncommon, but it seems more pronounced now. 

The top pic is from 2014, showing a similar area along the road
to the bottom pic from last week.

We were told that to the NE and SW of our city there are fields doing well, but the other areas are worthless this year. As we drove along the road from the capital to our home city, it seemed like we saw many more fields that had hardly any growth in the millet plants despite the time of year that they should be more like 5 ft. tall by now. We’ve compared it in pictures to our drive at the same time of year in 2014, and you can see some poor spots in fields, but overall the growth was much better then. This makes things even more dicey in terms of food security this year because of lots of added refugees in parts of the country due to problems in a neighboring country. Please pray that more steady rains would come and there will be a good enough harvest in the good areas to make up for the areas that have been lacking!

-- El Padre