When it rains, it pours...and then it floods

It's early evening and the afternoon heat has finally broken. The sky just over the courtyard wall is beginning to glow orange, while still a pale blue directly overhead. Feeling the warm air against my skin, dip a bowl into the cool water of the pila and begin to wash away the grime and sweat which has accumulated over the past 24 hours. Man that water feels good.

It amazes me how my definition of things has changed since coming down here. Especially my idea of what it means to be "clean". For example, my idea of a shower is now dumping bowl fulls of water over my head from a concrete tub we keep behind the house. It really needs to be cleaned, but we can't until Sunday, which is the one day we have reliably running water.
Another trial of hygiene has been laundry. All laundry here must be washed by hand in a bucket of soapy water, rinsed out in another bucket, and then hung up to dry. Now, for the record, I do not have a problem with this, however my work schedule and the weather does. Washing by hand takes time, something I do not yet have as I am helping to set up a school by next Monday. It also requires nice weather in which to dry the laundry outside. I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but it is currently the rainy season in Honduras. This means that, surprise surprise, it rains a lot. Especially in the afternoon when one is hopping to do the laundry.

Lucky for me, this last Tuesday we had our teacher's planning day at one of the other volunteer houses. This particular house is in a gated community about 10 minutes drive outside of Juticalpa. The volunteers call this community "Florida", because of the very cushy conditions provided there (and it really does look like an old people's community from Florida!)

In Florida, they have reliably running water EVERY DAY. They have a covered patio to hang their washing up in on rainy days. Their pila is even inside in a utility room. But greatest of all these things is that they have a washing machine! True you have to fill the thing with water using a bucket, and then again for the rinse cycle, but you can wash a whole load of laundry at once! So in between lesson planning, I decided to avail myself of the amenities. I was even able to wash my bedsheets, which were beginning to smell like old cheese (and not the good kind you enjoy with a nice Merlot).

I didn't quite have time to finish drying everything, but as it was sunny out I just took them home in a plastic bag and hung them up on our own line. I was just happy that my sheets were clean, and promptly put them on my bed, dreaming of the blissfull sleep I would have that night.

In the meantime, I and a couple other volunteers had decided to have a good meal that evening of roast chicken and mashed potatoes. We needed a few more things though, so we headded off to the shops.

Then everything went wrong.

Just as we finnished our shopping, the monsoon hit. Most of the city is on an incline, and our house is at the top (or there about), so to get home we had to fight our way past raging torrents of filthy water. In some places you could litterally not see the road. Over the course of 20 minutes there had been enough rain that, looking down one of the sideroads two blocks from our house, we could see a car almost totally submerged!

The worst part though was my laundry. I could not have been wetter if I had dropped it in the pila. To make matters worse, I hade left my window open and now half my bed was soaked! I stripped the bed and set the sheets up on the backs of several chairs in the living room (I left the rest of the laundry on the line; a completely lost cause).

At least we still had a good meal to look forward to right? Wrong. No sooner was I about to set about peeling the potatoes when the power went out. Have I mentioned we have an electric stove? This is why I prefer gas.

So there we all were, sitting around a few candles (I came prepared!) in the common room, sharing a meal of soda and half a bag of chips. I sat under my sheets like a tent. We were going to try and make the best of a bad situation, and were just about to play a stiring round of apples to apples, when Maki got a phone call.

It seems the Santa Clara Elementary School dosn't have very good drainage...

So ten minuites late we were piling into the back of Carlos's truck to head down to the school. It was only lightly rainging at this point, so the ride was pretty bad (for more details on riding in trucks in Honduras, see my earlyer posts). I have said before that there is no more of a white-knuckle ride that riding in the back of a Honduran truck in the rain...I was wrong. Doing it at night is far worse. There are places where the road is washed out, or where you can see the slope below you is slowly washing away, and all you can think about is what if this is the rain that finally collapses it? The roaming mangy dogs are also quite unnerving on dark Honduran streets in the middle of the night. The word "chupacabra" was mentioned more than once...and to be honest, they really do look kinda demonic when they're wet and their eyes are glowing in the headlights.

The school had about and inch of water in it, including the library. So we set about sweeping. Yup, sweeping. Thankfully some extra help from the college arrived, and we soon became a well oiled, water moving machine. We even got to chase a few frogs out of the school...frogs the size of Honduran cockroaches (which is big)!

Wednesday was painful. Jeff had school, and I had to do more planning. Lacey, who was already getting sick finally sucummed and had to take the day off school. Wednesday evening though, we finally got our roast chiken and mashed potatoes. My bed and sheets were mercifully dry by the time we got back from de-swamping the school, and I hear they are putting in a better drainage system already!

By today the last of my clothes are dry. A bit stiff, but dry none the less. And they don't smell either! That makes them good enough to wear!

So like I said, you  really have to re-define things down here, especially what it means to be "clean".