Reflections during Ramadan

It's the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and also the height of the rainy season here in Senegal. Although this is a predominantly Muslim country, it is not a place where everything comes to a complete halt during the day in Ramadan, however things do seem to slow down a bit, which in some cases means going from slow, to almost stopped. And then of course everything livens up once night falls as people on fast are free to eat and drink again. Where I live currently I can hear the call to prayer, particularly the one just before daybreak, which is the signal for the last meal before starting the day's fasting afresh, and also the one as the sun goes down - the signal to start eating again. It’s a daily reminder that I'm not home in rural England, where the equivalent would be the sound of church bells ringing.
And, as I say, it’s also the rainy season, during which, it rains - a lot. Usually the rain is heavy but short lived, although there have been a couple of days where it has rained for most of the day. The result - lots of flooding. I'm guessing they call it the rainy season because it rains like this every year. However this doesn't seem to have prompted much in the way of taking measures to deal with heavy rain, and as a consequence the TV news and newspapers are full of people in abject circumstances, waist deep in water, surrounded by their few possessions, presumably ruined. In addition it's a been a month of power cuts. A reasonably regular occurrence here they became much more frequent for a couple of weeks, with many people being cut off for days on end. Luckily where I live was not too badly affected by either floods or power cuts, although we did have a share of both. But the situation in other parts of Dakar was bad enough for people to take to the streets, with ominous talk of bringing down the Government. The president meanwhile had decamped to Biarritz for a few weeks, where I'm guessing there were few power cuts or floods.
The situation in other parts of the region has been even worse, with, for instance, severe flooding in Burkina Faso which affected the WFP country office.
Meanwhile at the office we have been preparing for the annual Regional ICT meeting, which will be taking place in early October. I'm going to be running a 2 day workshop as part of this - so will be quite busy over the next few weeks preparing that, as well as for a trip to Burkina Faso at the end of October, fact finding about Food Voucher programmes which is one of the projects I'm currently involved in. Between the two I will be taking a bit of a break as Raksha (my wife) is coming over and we hope to spend some time seeing a bit more of the country - which I'm really looking forward to.