I am writing a personal narrative final draft paper: From my rough draft (Attached below), Instructions is 3-4 pages and double spacedincludes a heading and page numbersincludes a thoughtful and i

As she was my role model, my innocent younger self believed her instantly, for she was almost always right just about everything. That year, rain didn’t come as expected. I remember the courtyard behind our house, the dirt cracked and pale instead of dark and soft the way it turned every summer.

My grandmother kept sweeping it thoroughly anyway, out of habit more than needed. A few weeks later in the early evening I found her standing at the edge of our yard, looking toward the hills the way she always did before the rains, except this time she just stood there longer than usual, in silence. There was a lot of wonder in my head thinking what my precious grandma would be thinking. Abayey (grandmother), I repeated gently - grandma - “when is it going to rain?” She didn’ t answer right away.

Then she said, “‘Aba-jigo (God of rain)’ doesn’t keep its word like it used to.” I asked why, and she responded confidently, "Because we haven't done enough repentance, and Aba-jogo remains silent instead of washing away our sins through heavy rains like he often does ." I didn’ t understand what she meant, not fully.

I just knew that the small garden behind our house where she grew berbere (peppers), tomatoes and a few stalks of maize every year stayed empty that very summer.

My grandma was filled with sorrow and uncertainty.

My great uncles, who farmed not far from the city, came by our house more often than usual, and their conversations at the table were overwhelmed with doubts and far from laughter and smiles, more worried than before. I remember overhearing him say the wells near their land were lower than he’d ever seen them and he shared his worries about how he would feed his family , knowing farming was his main source of income. It wasn’ t until years later, in my science class, that I learned there was a name for what my grandmother had noticed long before anyone gave it one; the rainfall patterns across the country were shifting, that of the highlands of Eritrea. Scientists called it climate change, but to her , it was simpler than that. "The rain (Aba-jigo) doesn't listen anymore," she told me once, shaking her head as she looked out over the dry Aba-jigo always relied on a predictable rhythm of rain, seeing that rhythm break down. I thought about her standing in that cracked courtyard, reading the sky the way she’d read it her whole life, and finding it had stopped speaking to her the same way.

I heard my grandmother praying through tears, begging God to respond, to wash away our sins, and to give the farmers their daily bread by blessing the earth with rain. Her voice would rise and fall with each request, as if she believed that speaking the words with enough feeling might finally be heard. As an extension of her solo prayers, she would gather her female friends and walk around the neighborhood singing hymns and reciting psalms, praising God, asking for forgiveness, and asking for the rhythm of rain to return, the same way their ancestors once had. As time passed, when I visited my grandma again as a teenager after attending boarding school, the courtyard had changed. My grandmother had stopped planting her peppers. “Too much risk for too little rain,” she told me, matter-of-factly , like she was talking about the price of bread rather than the loss of something she’d done every summer for sixty years. Her ritual was taken away from her yet her confidence in Aba-jigo seemed never to fade. In her words, I noticed she believed mankind had stopped depending on God, and that's why God refused to respond. "Once we started depending on ourselves and escaping from God, we poisoned ourselves and our mother earth through consistent sin," she said. Aba-jogo chose not to respond the same way he did for our ancestors. Looking back I remember her life and conversation like it was yesterday.

Her reasoning was not the kind we see in headlines: no flood, no fire, nothing sudden. Just a small garden that quietly stopped growing as well as my uncle’s worries, and a woman who still stood outside expecting the sky to keep its promises, even as her doubt grew year after year.

That's the part of climate change I understood best, not the charts or the science, but the sound of my grandmother sweeping a dry courtyard, waiting for something that had once come like clockwork and had simply stopped, without warning, without apology.

She never stopped believing the rain would return. But I think, somewhere beneath that belief, she also understood it might not be due to mankind's deeds yet she kept praying anyway.