When the Rains Fail

When the rains fail, everything else in the village begins to fail with them: the wells, the harvests, the quiet arrangements that let neighbors trust one another in good years. Set against the hard economic times of its era, this is a story about the daily, unglamorous work of getting by: stretching what little there is, making impossible choices between pride and survival, and finding out which bonds hold when scarcity tests every one of them. There is no single villain here, only drought, debt, and the slow erosion of a way of life people assumed would always be there. What remains is the question of who adapts, who breaks, and who finds an unexpected kind of strength in the getting by itself.