"People are asking if this the end of the drought, but what we are saying is its effects are going to persist for a long time," Peter Ambenje, assistant director of the Kenya Meteorological Department, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"It is not the beginning of the long rains," he said.

The United Nations estimates that at least 6.25 million people are in need of immediate food aid across east and central Africa because of drought, which has killed hundreds of people and left tens of thousands of head of livestock dead.

Yet over the past week, from southern Burundi in central Africa, to Kenya's central highlands and northern Rift Valley, heavy rains have come and even caused damage.

Many thought it was an early start to the long rainy season, which usually begins in mid-March and lasts through May.

Instead, the weather system that developed into an Indian Ocean cyclone last week sucked moist air eastward from Uganda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, said Ambenje and Mohamed Mhita, the director of Tanzania's Meteorological Agency.

The new rain in Kenya did not reach the arid north, along the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia where drought is the worst. People in those three countries, along with Eritrea, Djibouti and parts of Tanzania and Burundi, are facing famine.

In that respect this year's rainy season is far more important than just supporting the growth of crops on which the region's farmers and economies depend: it will decide whether the famine intensifies throughout 2006.

TAKING NO CHANCES

In western Kenya, no one wasted any time putting seeds in the newly moistened soil produced by the week's burst of rain.

"We are not taking chances and many of us have moved straight into planting," maize farmer John Onyango in the Rabuor area of Nyando district told Reuters.

Farmers believe the rain will help turn around a devastating crop failure from last year, the worst in a decade.

"At last the gods seem to be answering our prayers for rains because we were running into a phase of disaster without any food to eat," said Mary Atieno, a farmer in Kaluande village of Kenya's Kisumu district.

But some farmers in flood-prone areas of western Kenya worried that there could be too much of a good thing.

"In as much as we are happy for the rains, there is some fear deep inside that they could trigger floods that would kill our crops and make our efforts futile," Wilson Oyugi said.

In the Rumonge district in southern Burundi, heavy rain on Saturday damaged about a dozen homes and washed away part of the road that runs to the capital Bujumbura.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, thunderstorms on Tuesday night snarled traffic as cars stalled in flooded streets and thick red mud poured off hillsides into some roads.