Not only Tuscany and Italy. Unfortunately, the inclemency of the weather, in terms of continuous and above-average rainfall, also affects Kenya at this time. Local news reports in these days tell of deaths (at least a dozen), hundreds of missing persons and 100,000 displaced families.
It is unclear whether it is El Niño or some of its lesser relatives, but not too much, but the rains have been raging for the past week and are predicted by meteorologists to do so again in the coming days.

In the meantime, the damage is also being counted here, considering that many of the houses submerged or affected by the bad weather, are huts or shacks and have left homeless populations already tried by misery and hunger, with the spectre of epidemic water diseases, such as cholera and typhus.
Flooding in the Samburu area has caused three deaths and numerous cattle dragged away by the rush of water and mud.
A government helicopter rescued, in an exceptional manoeuvre captured by a video that went viral, eight people on a truck that was sinking into a road that had turned into a raging torrent, and so did others, including three tourists. Deaths also occurred in Meru and in the hinterland of Nairobi, where a bridge collapsed in the town of Juja and also created major communication disruptions, cutting off the village of Komo from the world.

It was worse in Mandera County, in the northeast of the country, where it hardly ever rains but when water comes from the sky it is a disaster. Five are dead but the count will have to be updated with the many missing. The county has announced that 100,000 families have been displaced and that two thousand of them have lost everything.

Twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rain, between Thursday and Friday, also on the coast, where Mombasa was paralysed and without power for hours, with cars swallowed up by immense lakes that formed in the working-class neighbourhoods. Also blocked was the Mombasa-Malindi highway at Takaungu, where lane widening works are proceeding but the mud from the road diversions blocked some tractor-trailers, creating kilometre-long queues. Water also in Malindi where the condition of the roads is worsening by the day. Fortunately, the level of the Galana River, which has always been at risk of flooding, is still under control, but further prolonged rainfall could trigger an emergency.

They call them little rains, but with the climate changes of recent years, there is no more certainty in diminutives, as there is in accretives. "Bless the water, as long as it does not all come at once," said, more or less, a Taita holy man.
According to experts, the rains, though not continuous, should last until the first week of December.

(photo: Facebook)