Just when you thought you couldn’t stand the heat and humidity anymore, and started to believe it would never rain this season, well… it didn’t rain, it POURED! Every year Boavista (and most of Cape Verde) is blessed with a miserable week or so of rain, which despite being short, it is pretty intensive. It is that time of the year when streets get flooded, roads get destroyed, crops vanish, sea turns brown…

To our despair, it is also when our camps get blown away by the wind, get flooded by the rain, volunteers desperately try to save their belongings from getting wet while avoiding catching a really bad cold.

Patrolling in the rain is not fun (at least for most, and definitely not the Capeverdeans, who are not that used to it!!!), and coming back to wet clothes and soggy sleeping bag is very unpleasent. However, volunteers and team members in both camps dealt with all the flooding and destruction with a smile.

As for the turtles, yes. The day of the storm, as usual, a high number of turtles came ashore, ensuring that we would get very wait while we waited for each one of them to return safely to the sea. The next day, water was dirty, smelly and cold. We got wet for nothing, they didn’t come!! Yet, we patiently patrol and wait for those who come anyways, raining or not.

But its not all bad, this rain. After all, it is after the rainy season, that Boavista has more reasons to smile. The same annoying and disruptive rain that drives us crazy for a couple of weeks a year eventually give away to the brightest shades of green, to new plants growing everywhere, to fat and healthy looking goats and dunkeys. It is now that Boavista gets rid of all the dust in accumulated for months, and looks really clean. And beautiful. As always, but with brighter colours.

(Originally posted/written by Joana Hancock)