Lots of rain - but no water...in the tank, that is

Somehow, we seem to have something slightly interesting happening. Yesterday, (Tuesday) while it wasn’t very interesting, I guess, the power was off all day. It came on in the evening after being off for about 22 hours. The meat in my freezer was still frozen solid so that was good. The fresh milk we had bought and boiled on Monday went sour, though. It wasn’t cold enough yet when the power went off Monday night to keep it fresh. So I am attempting to make “cottage cheese”. If it works, I’ll use it to make lasagna – I think I saw lasagna noodles somewhere in town… I used the opportunity of a quiet day to handwrite some letters to folks who don’t have email. After all the rain we had on Monday, Tuesday was a dry, hot, sunny day.

In the evening, Mark and I went to the chapel service at FATER. We walked there and back, in the dark. It’s kind of weird not having street lights and trying to walk on a dirt road (we did have a flashlight but didn’t use it).

Today, Wednesday, we woke up to an overcast day. It often starts out a bit overcast but then burns off as the sun comes up. Well, today, it just got darker and darker. By 9:00am it was almost spooky how dark it was outside. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was 6:30 at night. Well, the thunder started rolling and the rain started coming down and it rained and rained and rained – steadily and non-stop until around 3:30 in the afternoon! It was incredible. Charlotte came for our language lesson and said that it was very unusual to have rain lasting for so long. Our poor milkman finally came after lunch but was drenched. I’m sure a lot of businesses suffered today as people waited and waited for the rain to let up but it just kept coming and coming. My new computer desk was to be delivered today but with the rain, there was no way that was going to happen. I’ll bet we’ve had more rain this week than So. California has had in a year.

We still haven’t gotten water from the city or a tanker truck yet so we put buckets out again to collect some of the rain water. We have a large barrel we store water in so we topped that off and then we flushed toilets well with rain water and Mama Fifi mopped the floors. And we still had extra water. This evening our guard, Uwimwana, helped Mark pour the rain water into the tank to give us a little more. Hopefully, the city will send water soon.