Rain, Rain Go Away

We are in the middle of the rainy season here. And what a season it is. Every afternoon we get rains that range from a slight drizzle to a torrential down pour. The entire compound is a mess of mud, soggy grass approaching the level of swamps, slippery sidewalks of slime, and bovine urine run-off. It’s a total mess.

The overflow of the rain was getting so bad at the upper compound that some of the clinicians were in danger of floating away. Or at least their furniture was. Their entire rooms were flooded with water. They were standing in water, cooking in water, their kids were sleeping in water, and some of them had to sleep on tables because they couldn’t sleep on the floor. Luckily, Tom Tucker from Agape, took his tractor and dug large drainage ditches on the sides of the road directly above the compound that re-directed the flow of water away from our Lalmba staff.

Often the rain has gotten so bad that it doesn’t even come down, it assaults you in horizontal sheets of water spikes. The water will bathe your feet as you are trying to sleep inside your room within the confines of your mosquito net. It will shower you as you deposit your dishes in the kitchen sink. It will blow windows open knocking condiments off tables and endangering your precious electronics.

And that’s on a good day.

The other day when the rain was coming down so hard that I ate dinner with my headphones on to mitigate the attack on my eardrums, we had an easy time of it. However, one of Jenifer’s trees fell down onto one of her buildings causing some damage. A papaya tree in front of the Tuckers’ house collapsed and took another tree with it. The tree was dead and so they had to cut it away and now the Tuckers’ entrance looks much sadder without the arborial decoration. And while Jackson was about to eat his dinner, the metal roof on his house blew clean off! Here he was about to enjoy a meal and then suddenly the entire inside of his house is exposed to the elements. He had to rush around like a headless chicken to rescue his furniture and such and place it in another one of his buildings. Now, he has a temporary replacement roof that leaks making his original home more protected from the outside but nevertheless uninhabitable until he can get another iron roof.

There is so much water here that the ground is completely saturated. In the middle of the day when it is dry and 85 degrees, water will still be leaking out of the ground on to the sidewalk trying to find its way to Lake Victoria where it will be welcome. Twice before, there was so much water flowing on the walkway towards our houses outside the cookhouse that we named it the Lalmba River.

When we returned from a trip to Kisii for supplies the other day, the drive from Migori took us almost 2 hours because the road was so overwhelmed by all the water. Numerous bridges were covered with water. One section of the road was entirely submerged in almost a couple feet of water just below our running boards. Daniel, in seventeen years working as a driver for Lalmba, had never ever seen that much water over this section of road. He was not concerned about the many semi-washed away bridges but this sight was definitely a new one on him. Sometimes being the first volunteer at so many things is not what it’s cracked up to be; the possibility of being the first one washed away into the depths of Lake Victoria by a flash flood is not my idea of fun. Stupid rain.