Lord, Does It Rain!

And the Lord said to Noah, “I will cause it to rain”. The Lord spoke again this morning and the approximately 3 inches in an hour had us starting to look for the animals. Of course this happened just as we were going to school. We were wet from the knees down while carrying a large umbrella. Thirty minutes after school started and the sun was shining.

Most all buildings are open here in some form or another. There is neither a source of heat nor a source of air conditioning. Our apartment has a place for windows, but one is missing. School hallways are all exterior and are just covered by a roof. Many roofs are corrugated tin. You never mistake the sound of rain. In our time here so far, it has rained at some time during the 24 hours, five days out of seven. Nobody talks about the rain. It just is.

One might think that with so much rain, construction would be designed to deal with it. Think again. The new second story of the high school houses two large rooms now used as libraries and two teacher workrooms. The tin roof requires a cap at the peak of the roof. The cap is about half large enough so that heavy rains like this morning blow back up to the peak, under the cap, and down into the rooms.

The exterior hallway on the second floor of the main school building, although covered by a roof, takes on blown water on a day like today. There are outlets so the water can run off the floor and on to the ground below. All of this sounds good until you find out the hall tips back toward the class room doorway, not toward the exterior drain outlets. The floor in the computer room collected about an inch of water throughout. We also discovered the ceramic floor tile is not all pasted down and we had floating tile because the tile has some wood on the back side. Wet-vacs are an unknown piece of equipment.

There is a reason they call it the rainforest. And that is why we enjoy the wild flowers of every description during the sunny part of every day.