Baccalauréat · Série C · Anglais — 2020

TEXT — Forty years of rain

Every morning at seven o'clock, for forty-one years, Monsieur Zoungrana walked to the end of his yard, looked into a metal rain gauge and wrote a number in a school exercise book. Then he made his tea.

He was a primary school teacher in a village near Ouahigouya. He had begun in 1979 because his pupils were arguing about whether it had rained more « in the old days ». He had no instrument, so he made one from a tin can.

Today his exercise books — twelve of them, tied with string — are studied by researchers from the University of Ouagadougou. They show something no satellite could have recorded: the total quantity of rain has hardly changed, but the number of rainy days has fallen by a third. It rains as much, in fewer and much more violent storms.

« That is why the fields are washed away, » he explains. « When you receive thirty millimetres in twenty minutes, the soil does not drink: it runs. My father used to plant on the fifteenth of June. Nobody knows any more when to plant. »

He is eighty-one. He has taught his grand-daughter to read the gauge. « The number is nothing, » he says. « What matters is that somebody writes it down every single day. »