Rainy Season

It is December 6 today and we awoke to a gray drizzle that soon became a steady pounding on our tin roof. It was a welcome sound. The rains are late this year. The heat has increased in intensity, the clouds have built up, the thunder has rumbled for about 2 weeks now but very little rain has fallen. So we are thankful for the rain.

When it is pouring like it was this morning, most people stop and stay where they are. Meetings are understood to be postponed until the downpour stops. Maria, our house help lady, got caught in the market in the rain. So she found shelter there and stayed until the rain stopped, arriving about half an hour late.

My dilemna now is how to manage the children's play. The girls happily went outside as soon as the rain stopped. What fun to climb the sand piles (for the construction work of our garage), to rub hands in the mud, and to run off some energy. But there is a cleanliness cost to this fun! When I get the camera back from Victor, I'll take a picture. Clothes, shoes, hands, feet black with mud and sand. (Even the panties, under the pants got brown!) So do we only play and live inside during the rainy season, trying to stay clean? Or do we go for all out fun outside? Even careful play outside would leave one dirty. So we are going to try this: when they are tired of outside, we clean up and stay inside the rest of the day. As for the clothes, there will be one or two sets of play clothes that will be just that: for playing in all sorts of weather and conditions and then hand washed and used again. Crocs (their footwear) are washable as are their little bodies!

The other challenge will be drying cloth diapers! Thankfully our old 3rd or 4th or 5th hand washing machine still works to spin them almost dry. We'll be thankful for every sun ray that breaks through the clouds these next 3 months or so.

Thank you, Lord, we still have water to clean up with. Our neighbors to the right had water until last week. Their water level in the well dropped so low that it is mostly muddy murky water now. So they come for water now too. We have been learning to conserve water too. But if these rains continue now, the wells should fill up again.