At first sight, this sounds like some sort of philosophical saying - it is. But the philosophy behind this is not what today’s post is about.
Today’s post is about the kind of literal meaning of it, born from an experience I had yesterday and today going to work.
Everyone loves the rainy season. No? Fine then, many people love the rainy season. I happen to be one of said people. But like everything else in the universe, it’s not only the beautiful flowers or clear blue skies it comes with.
It comes with mud as well! A lot of it!
But of course, not everyone will relate to this because not everyone comes from a third world country and not everyone that comes from a third world live in environments with muddy roads.
Anyways, the past 2 days, the road from my hostel has been very messy because of some unwarranted “road improvements” that were done in the neighborhood.
I say unwarranted because you don’t do road improvements that leave the road looking like it’s being excavated in the rainy season. I’m not even going to lie, the condition that the road is in now is almost 5x worse than it was before it started. I thought improvements were supposed to do the opposite.
I mean, sure we had a few bumps here and there on the road, but who cares about bumps as long as they can get where they want to go, right? Now the road looks like a swamp and if you’re not driving, you need to carry a pair of shoes to change after you cross this mess.
I had to walk to campus with a wet cross yesterday because I couldn’t find my footing some where in all that slipperiness and so my cross fetched a good amount of mud. I couldn’t go back to change a shoe because I was late and because I’d face the same fate coming back. Take a different route? Well that would work except the only other route is not only much muddier, but also time-consuming to follow.
I was honestly surprised to find the road in that condition yesterday. This road has been like this since I got here and nothing has been done about it since. And all of a sudden, someone decides to do something about it in the rainy season?. It almost sounds like it was deliberate. But I’m not surprised. This is probably some politician’s effort to try to deceive the people of community into giving him their vote in the coming elections.
This sour experience generally has me looking forward to the dry season. Not that it won’t come with it’s challenges itself, but at least I won’t have to take 1 minute pauses to figure out where to pass to have the least amount of mud on my shoes and feet.