Rain

This week the rains really arrived after a false start in September. It’s not that it rains all day, but when it comes, usually in the afternoon, it can be too heavy even to drive safely. All activity around the town stops, people just shelter and wait for it to end. The children next door didn’t get home from school until 8pm on Tuesday because we had a very extended spell.
The rain of this week brings home what it is to be poor in this country. You often see people absolutely soaked to the skin, knowing that they probably have long walks ahead of them into the surrounding countryside and may not even have houses which are proof against the rain. They also face the risk of flooding from the streams which appear everywhere during rain in the land of a thousand hills.
It has also demonstrated that in an isolated community like ours, everyone is to some extent poor. Power cuts have become more frequent. The rain, or more likely the accompanying lightning, has brought a problem with telephone landlines, making the banks inoperative for 2 days and also preventing anyone who has pay-as-you-go electricity from buying new cards. They require the Electrogaz office to use their internet connection, which is down. Since Thursday is “gacaca” and everything is shut in the morning, it will mean 3 days without a bank.
In all of this, people remember that the rain is necessary for planting crops and there are few complaints. In fact I am amazed at how little damage is done to the newly-planted crops even by the downpours of this week.