Mariana the Rain Maker

Mariana used to love the rain. Every time it rained, she wanted to go out and soak herself in the rain and play in it. She was in love with the rain.

She was a small girl, eight years old, but she loved nature and especially the rain. She was very curious, so she used to ask her daddy and mummy, "What makes the rain come? What's the story behind the rain? Why does water fall from the sky?"

Initially, because when she was young it was difficult to explain to her, people used to say that God creates the rain, and whenever it gets dry or the plants need water, that's why God sprinkles water from the sky. She used to understand that, but later on she understood that was just a story to please her. So she started to understand the real reason for the rain.

Then they explained to her the real reason. What happens is that when the sun shines brightly, the water from the sea evaporates. The water from the sea goes up and then forms clouds. The water vapor becomes clouds, and the clouds travel with the wind. When the clouds have a lot of water, they become dark, and then they come down. That water vapor turns into rain.

So essentially it is a cycle. The sea has water, the sun shines, the water evaporates and becomes clouds. The clouds travel, and when they become heavy, they come down. The water comes to the ground, goes to the rivers, goes into the ground, and goes back to the sea. The water keeps going round and round and round. That's the story of the rain.

She was very, very fascinated by that. She studied it a lot and understood how the vapor is created, how the clouds are created, how the clouds move. She used to take pictures of the clouds all the time.

When she grew up, she became an environmental scientist. She learned environmental science, and because she used to love rain so much and had studied it so much, she now knew a lot about the clouds—how the clouds come, how the clouds move, why the clouds come down, how the rain is created.

Now what happened was, in those days there were many places where there was no rain because it was dry. There are some places where there's a lot of rain and some places where there is no rain.

Once in Singapore, there was no rain for three months and everything became dry. The reservoirs came down and people were worried because it was getting very, very dry. All the grass was brown.

She and a few people knew how to make rain. What they would do is take an airplane and go up. If the clouds were not coming to Singapore because the clouds were outside of Singapore—they were in Malaysia or Indonesia—they could take a giant helicopter, go up, and do something known as rain seeding.

They could create a little bit of pressure near Singapore in the air by something known as seeding. You create a low pressure in the air, and then the cloud is sucked towards that low pressure. It's like a magnetic condition. The clouds come, and then they create conditions for the cloud to come down.

So she created this process of making artificial rain. It's not artificial—it's real rain—but she created a process of making the cloud travel to a country. You do it only sometimes because it's quite expensive.

She brought this technique, and they made a lot of rain in Singapore. The clouds came down and there was a lot of rain. She made the clouds travel, all very scientifically. So they started calling her the Rain Maker.

But she said, "This thing can only be done sometimes. You should not interfere with the natural process. Only if there is a big drought, if it hasn't been raining, or you really need to make rain, then you do it." There is a process by which you do it—you basically create low pressure clouds.

She taught other people how to do this all over the world. She said that you should only do it very, very rarely when you really need rain, but otherwise let the natural process take its place.

So then she came to be known as Mariana the Rain Maker.

She created her own company, which taught people how to conserve water and how not to make water dirty. She was an environmentalist, and she made a big campaign everywhere in the world so that people would stop using plastic.

Especially what is known as single-use plastic—the single-use plastic where you use the straw once or you use the water bottle once, and then the plastic goes into the sea. In the sea, there are millions and millions and millions of plastic bottles and plastic cups and straws, which are basically destroying the fish. It is also interfering with the rain cycle because if there's too much plastic in the sea, the water cannot evaporate properly, and that's why rain gets impacted.

So she started educating people on how to reduce their plastic consumption also.

That's her story. She made a big impact in the world by firstly creating a process of bringing the rain down, and also teaching people to reduce the use of plastic.