Thunder!

Method 1 of producing thunder:
Make a batch of peas to eat with dinner, but accidentally make far too many.
After eating, put the remaining peas in a sealing container purchased in Tanzania and leave them on the counter.
Wait three days.
When asked if they smell spoiled by Mama Shukuru, lie and answer “no.”
Eat the re-heated, three day-old peas, which are in fact spoiled.
Thunder!

I “discovered” this method last week, using peas that I cooked on Tuesday. Friday came, and Mama Shukuru wanted to cook lunch for us. I had put the leftover peas in a “sealed” container, but I’m not certain that it did its job in preventing bacteria from entering. I am certain that, when Mama Shukuru asked me to smell the peas, I was working on lesson plans. Distractedly, I told her I thought they smelled a little off (this wasn’t true, they were pretty far gone). She disagreed, and since she was cooking and I was busy, we left it at that. That is, she cooked them and we subsequently ate them. As I ate, I thought the taste was odd, but the flavor intensity of Mama Shukuru’s cooking masked it well, much like the cologne of a sweaty man.

Flash forward two hours, and I’m sitting in the internet café, feeling woozy and nauseous, a slight stomach discomfort. I didn’t know why I the time and assumed that maybe it was just exhaustion. In fact, the nausea reached a point where I was looking through my pack for a plastic bag, “just in case.” Upon leaving the internet café, I’d planned to walk up to my friend’s house to visit and then get dinner. Did I mention that last Friday was my birthday? We had arranged a night of good food, cold drinks. By the time I was a quarter of the way up the hill, I had to call my friend and ask him to come pick me up. The pain in my stomach had exacerbated to the point where I could hardly walk.

Upon reaching his house, I flopped on his couch and attempted to remain completely motionless. As a proper friend and host, he brought me my first “birthday beer,” which I was obligated by man-code to drink. Nothing good came of that. I’m pretty sure nothing good ever comes from the man-code. Other friends showed up over the next half an hour or so, and I couldn’t even stand to greet them.

With the hope that walking might help me out, we all ambled down the hill to the restaurant, 15 minutes away. By the time we arrived, the thunderheads had formed. For the next three or four hours while my friends got drunk and ate delicious food, I was thunderstruck. Some birthday… I was in pain until two days later. Come Monday, what did Mama Shukuru cook for lunch? More peas.


Method two of producing thunder:
Take a very large cloud.
Rub its molecules together so that friction causes its electrons to be freed.
Allow the electrons to arrange themselves on the bottom of the cloud, hence giving the earth near the cloud a positive charge by induction.
Continue building electrons until there are so many the air can no longer keep them from traveling to the positive charges on the earth.
Thunder!

Bukoba is well-known as being one of the rainiest towns in Tanzania, largely due to Lake Victoria’s proximity. Ihungo tends to get lashed pretty severely as it is on the crest of a plateau, and the rain clouds often break directly over our school. Throughout the campus, one can spot several tall metal lightning rods, for good reason: I have seen more thunderstorms and lightning here in a year and a half than I had during all my previous years together. However, as luck goes, usually the storms pass to one side or another of the school, and we avoid lightning.

Yesterday, while I was sitting in the staff room preparing a lesson on, aptly enough, electrostatics, the sky began to darken. This was more than the usual deluge, we could tell that sound and fury were approaching, ready to tear our school apart. The storm seemed to pick up momentum as it continued, until as I looked out the window, rain obscured everything but the nearest five meters. For those of you who have sat in a room with a metal roof during a thunderstorm, you know just how overpowering the roar of the rain can be; it swallows all sound, leaving you in a state of white-noise confusion.

The one thing that can be heard, incessantly, is the boom of the thunder. As a physicist, its easy to calculate how far away the lightning must be, due to the time difference between the light flash and the thundering (hint: its roughly a third of a kilometer for every second that passes, therefore three seconds corresponds to one kilometer; bam! get yourself educated). My habit during storms is to always count the distance of the lightning, and I began doing so. The first few were “five seconds” away, but then they got closer, closer, until I counted one strike less than a kilometer away. That means the storm was passing directly over Ihungo.

I should mention the attitude in the staff room at this time. Even among the well-educated teachers at my school, there is a certain primal fear of lightning. Coming from the nature-taming land of technology, I just smiled and continued lesson planning while others were turning off their cellular phones and rapidly talking in hopes of forgetting their fear. Then it struck, a bolt hit no more than five or ten meters from the staff room.

I can’t describe in words the feeling of having that much raw energy released so close to me. Sparks flew through the air, metal to metal. The flash of light, combined with the terrible boom, completely overwhelmed my senses. For that instant, that split-second, we were humans at the whim of the elements, only reacting to the forces around us. Never, ever believe that you aren’t scared of lightning. When it hits near you, you will be. Sweet fancy Moses.

You know in a scary movie, when Mr. Knifey pops out from behind the fridge, you scream and jump? When the bolt hit, I did that, but I tried setting the “scream and jump” world record. I had been mid-sentence, and there was a long pen scrawl across half the page, a testament to my abject fear and shock. I showed the page to the other teachers, who could not stop laughing. Jerks...

I got home and Mama Shukuru told me that when another bolt hit, she felt the electricity go up her legs (she wasn’t wearing any shoes; can anyone give us the reason she felt it?). Then she served me that second lunch of peas, and I was sad.