Life without seasons

Posted by: Helen

We arrived in Kenya in July, leaving behind the UK’s summer.  Flying across the equator, we arrived in Kenya’s winter, but the weather felt much the same. 

Now four months later, I sit at my desk in my office in Nairobi; looking out of the window and it still looks like July.  I have an odd sensational that time is standing still.  Where are my usual signs that the year is progressing?

?    the weather is not getting colder; in fact December and January are summer here, so it’s getting hotter

?    the days are not getting shorter; daylight on the equator is strictly 6am-6pm, all year round

?    where is Halloween, Bonfire night, Remembrance Sunday??

Then, suddenly, it appears that the year is nearly over.  The first recognisable symbol that time was passing came without warning: a string of coloured lights.  Christmas retail season has arrived in Kenya, targeting middle-class Kenyan cash in ways borrowed from the west: Christmas trees in glass-fronted shopping malls, and carol-themed jingles on the radio. I can’t believe it’s almost December. Christmas?!  Already?!  It just seems so wrong.

Back home I can be a bit of a scrooge, preferring long summer days spent outdoors, to cold ‘festive’ holidays stuck in the house.  But how can I grumble about Christmas this year, when the weather continues to heat up?  How can I complain when I’m free of pressured Christmas shopping and the usual decisions about where to be come Christmas day? 

So I won’t protest at all – I’ll embrace it.  Let’s have carols in the sunshine, and Christmas on the beach. And who wouldn’t thank their lucky stars for swimming outside in the sunshine in late November?  I think whining about this situation would prompt my friends and family back home to tell me ‘where to go’, whilst reminding me about drizzle, window condensation and cold fingers.

And yet still, the feeling remains: I miss the experience of seasons changing.  Autumn is Dan’s favourite time of year; never happier than when squelching through forest mud under clear blue skies, watching the leaves turning colour whilst we identify mushrooms.  OK, maybe it’s Mike Jones that knows all about the fungi (!), but in autumn, even I love an excuse to throw on an extra duvet and make soup.  As I embrace the mono-season here in Nairobi, I’m surprised to discover how much I miss the UK, just at the time of year when I normally start to grumble. 

I know it’s just new-ness, and in time the strange would become normal.  But our plan to spend just one year here, may mean that we have no time to get used to any strangeness we feel.  During her first few UK winters, my Brazilian friend Luana would often not leave her house between Friday night and Monday morning, seeing no need to expose her body to such extreme cold, if not for work.  She yearned for the warmth of ‘home’, but after almost 10 years in the UK, the cold no longer feels as harsh.  Now, she wraps up warm and heads out with a stoicism that matches her hard-won British citizenship; a sign of the long-term commitment she made to her adopted home.  (miss you, Lu!)

We have no plans to commit to Kenya in that way, although plenty of our follow volunteers want to – and do.  When he visited, my brother asked us what our plans were, whether we had become convinced of the benefits of an ex-pat lifestyle, as he has.  At the moment, all I can say is that my ‘Britishness’ is coming out here in the strangest of ways:  who would have believed I’d miss the sensation of summer ending, miss the cold weather, even miss a ‘proper’ English Christmas?  I find life here to be so very interesting, and every day is an adventure at the moment.  But, I’m clearly not ready to find new roots just yet, because right now, this life without seasons makes me feel very far from a place I still call home.