Down came the rain...

Hot, humid. Dusty, yellow, tan. Five times a day there’s a musical language pouring out of minarets, five times a day the bustle of the city pauses, five times a day it is painfully obvious you don’t belong. But the cars still move because even Wahhabi Islam lets you continue to travel during the call to prayer. The fountains continue to run, beautiful cascades of fresh water over blue tile, or shooting ten, twenty, fifty feet into the cloudless sky; a tribute to Jeddah’s desalination facilities. Jeddah is the greenest, most lush city of Saudi Arabia. Of all of the King’s cities, palaces, and resorts, he prefers Jeddah—the botanical gem in a country where the sun bakes greenery dry, where the wind scours plants from the sand, and where anything left in the sand is consumed by the goats, sheep and camels.

Rain. For the first time in the year and a half she’s lived in Jeddah, there’s rain. Her face is pressed to the glass, watching, entranced by the water pouring down, rivulets streaming and pooling on the windowpane. Her breath fogs the glass, and she draws a happy face, wishing she could go outside. Downstairs her mother is laboring over the stove top, carefully measuring ingredients into a pot. The woman is making chocolate pudding, and she’s taken the day off from work—the rain making terrible drivers even worse. The real motive for her day off, however, is to keep her three children from going outside and playing in the downpour.

“It isn’t clean, it will make you sick.”

And she’s right. It doesn’t rain in Jeddah. The city hasn’t seen a downpour like this in the past hundred years. Every so often, perhaps during the winter months, where the temperature of the city might drop down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the children wear windbreakers to school, there might be a short shower, lasting perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. It doesn’t even get your hair wet, this shower, and children lay on the asphalt of the playground to make rain angels. All the greenery of Jeddah is provided by the ever vigilant gardeners, the extravagant sprinkler system set up in private gardens, the public workers watering the median strips were the palm trees grow. Jeddah’s sewer system isn’t equipped to handle rain. The sewer system was never meant to handle this much water.