There were showers in Rongo, Migori county, on Wednesday night. There were also slight rains in the Oyugis area of Homa Bay county late Thursday.
A cooling breeze, which has been missing for two months, whistled in the Karachuonyo area of Homa Bay on Thursday night – a sign that the rains may come soon.
Singing and biting mosquitos rested from their season of fun under the sun, while the breeze lasted.
The showers in Rongo and Oyugis silenced for a day the whirling dust – a sign of a scorched earth. The dust storms have been raging for months.
Cynics, however, find it hard to link the signs of pending rains with the Tuesday, Valentine's Day Prayer for God's salvation from a devastating drought. Neither do they blame the drought on a capricious God who has withdrawn favour from hapless earthlings.
Supplicant victims of the drought, no less than the First Gentleman, the First Lady and their partisans, chorused 'Amen', as politically correct clergy petitioned the Almighty for rain.
The believers petitioned God to have mercy on suffering humanity – a people and a generation that consider themselves more sinned against than sinning.
After destroying the environment from its pristine Garden of Eden design, fatalistic spiritualists want God to remake and remark the landscape.
This generation has run out of water; it has run out of food. Animals are dying for lack of water and pasture. Farmers have fertilisers and seeds, but there is no water to wet the land.
The devastation is deathly. Overdue action is ever more urgent. The effects of procrastination and national waste are being felt across the land. The earth is naked, exposed, as the scorching heat burns.
The heat wave across the nude Earth is irritating. Lay victims are asking whether the Earth moved closer to the Sun, or the Sun relocated closer to the Earth to remind humanity of the folly of environmental ruination.
Those who grew up in the 1970s and the 1980s know the landscape had several protective layers of natural suits. Green was the Divine attire for the Earth, especially in the highlands and the Lake Victoria Basin.
In the 1970s and 1980s, children delayed on their way to school, while waiting for snakes to give way. The black mamba, green snakes, and puffadders would sunbathe, mate, fight, or mock-dance, entangled on narrow village paths.
The hideouts for then common reptiles were shrubs and indigenous trees that defined village paths. The holes around sisal roots were natural houses for snakes.
The black mamba occasionally strayed into huts, especially of old women, where they snarled around chilled water or uji pots. The snakes were on holiday from forested neighbourhoods.
The thick, green shrubs also marked household land boundaries. The most common vegetation then in much of Midwest Karachuonyo of Homa Bay county were sisal, acacia, ober and otho trees.
Rabbits, foxes, and antelopes galloped across paths, as hyenas yelled, preying on livestock.
Standard 7 pupils would sight relaxing leopards atop canopies of ober trees. The pupils would be on their way from night studies, then called 'prep'. They were preparing for what was then Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) examination.
The pupils always walked in groups because schools were four or more kilometres away from their homes. Sometimes those coming from farther afield would sleep in vacant teachers' quarters.
Wildlife and humanity had a pact: Respect my space, and I will keep away from your space.
God hasn't abandoned us. Neither is God the capricious Divine who denies earthlings their rights. Planning and acting on public development priorities would make us more adaptive to climate change than crying and praying for rain after destroying the environment. The paradox sucks.
