126 Hours of Rain

Anyelka (of the Jungle Death March, a student of mine and adventure companion) comes to my house this morning offering fresh tortillas, still warm off the adobe oven. We sit at the dining room table and chat for some time, mainly commenting on the weather. You see, today is Saturday and it’s been raining non-stop since Tuesday morning. There’s been a few half-hour breaks here and there but currently we’re going on more than a hundred straight hours of rain. That’s more rain than I’m used to seeing in a whole year, or even five years!

Anyelka tells me that in El Cariso, a community close to Cusmapa, 50 people have been evacuated from their flooded homes and that two houses have already collapsed here in town.

A few days before, we sat at the same table as Jubelkis (Anyelka’s sister) nonchalantly mentioned that one of her cousins died last weekend in the drainage ditch right outside my house. Apparently he’d been in town early morning to buy some cheese and other supplies, walked across one of the wooden plank bridges (which my friend Mike refers to as “rickety planks”), slipped, fell head-first into the concrete riverbed, and was unconscious for a few minutes gulping down rainwater before someone found him and took him to the health center. He died on the spot, a mixture of the concussion and drowning in 6 inches of rainwater. I wonder if anyone at the scene knew CPR? Because of this accident (which has been coming for some time, as the ditch is not covered and is located on a main street where children play unsupervised all the time) people are scared and avoid walking over it

Anyelka earnestly states that her mother’s been with her aunt in El Cariso all week, praying and holding vigil over the boy. The family lost two cousins in the past year. Last April, Manuel, an 18-year-old (who used to be in the same high school choir I currently teach) started coughing up blood and died within 24 hours. Death in Nicaragua- not a foreign event awaiting to take people at age 70 peacefully in their sleep. Death waits around every corner. In a shot given at the health center with an overdose of medication, which killed Anyelka’s oldest sister three years ago, in fungal infections which require pills too expensive for a family to buy, in the inability to provide basic first aid to someone with a minor injury.

Anyelka and I continue discussing the weather, and she informs me that another hurricane is on the way. “Haven’t you been watching the news?” she exclaims, wondering at the insanity of the fact that I don’t spend any of my time watching the three television channels we get here in town. She’s adamant and seems to have her facts straight, becoming the fourth or fifth person in the past day to tell me that there’s never been a rain like this here in Cusmapa (since Hurricane Mitch, which put the pueblo out of contact with civilization for nearly 2 ½ months). I call Lauren (my new roomate) into the room and tell her the big news. I figure that whether or not Anyelka’s news right, we should be prepared for the worst. So we strap on our soaking wet shoes, damp rain jackets, wool socks, pop open our broken umbrellas, and head out into the rain.

“What should we buy?” Lauren asks, her eyes grazing each shelf of our corner pulperia store. The 10 X 15 foot room, stuffed to the gills with essential items such as hair gel, gumballs, Coca Cola, Gustitos (a Cheeto/Dorito mix), sardines, and shortening grows silent in pregnant anticipation. What do the crazy gringas want now? I shrug, wondering if sardines take first prize as the only non-perishable item to be found in Cusmapa.

Four sticks of margarine, two bags of rice, a dozen eggs, a pound of potatoes, a pound of cheese, and some sweet bread later, we pay the store’s owner 114 cordobas (about six dollars) and wade our way carefully downhill (currently downstream) stepping over moss-covered rocks and dodging the current river of rainwater pouring down what once was our street. We pack our pantry (ie: old non-functioning refrigerator) with our hurricane supplies and set to making banana pancakes (because in the face of a storm, what else are you going to do?).

After breakfast and a strong cup of coffee, we turn on our TV (for the first time) to see what Channel 10 (the 24-hour news station) reports about the storm. Twenty minutes into the news-watching all we’ve learned consists of the fact that Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are buddy-buddy (big surprise there) and that George Bush has asked the legislature for “TLC” for Central American countries (lord knows what TLC means in Spanish, but we got a big kick out of that one as I‘m sure it does NOT refer to “tender loving care“). We also happen upon a program about fire-dancers, a Frankenstein-looking botox-enhanced mullet-sporting man singing about Jesus Cristo… and in the meantime realize that our roof has a massive leak. Nothing about the hurricane, so we turn off the scary electric box and figure we’ll just weather whatever comes our way.

I read in my Moon guidebook of Nicaragua some months ago about rains “being an excuse” for just about anything but never believed it until now. Public school’s been cancelled since last Tuesday and currently classes are suspended until further notice. We worked at Fabretto all last week but no students came, and to get to and from work was a quest each time. Thursday afternoon, after the strongest of rains hit town, Lauren and I ventured back to the house and ALL the streets in town were flooded riverbeds; we dodged raging waters left and right. Growing up in Montana, I was granted one “ice” day of winter freedom- we never had a single snow day in my 12 years of school! Imagine my thoughts regarding rain days….

A ridiculous concept, right? Wrong.

This kind of weather makes foot travel nearly impossible for many of my students who walk more than an hour to get to school each day. Most of them do not own a rain jacket (though it‘s rainy season six months of the year here) or any other waterproof clothing. My students who did show up last week at school wore sandals and cotton shorts and dresses and shivered constantly. Kids wander around the streets barefoot and wearing little or no clothing; while I’m dressed in the same garb I‘d sport for a day of downhill skiing. Our garden’s been ravaged. Half a banana tree fallen, all the sunflowers satiated and keeling over, roots exposed. I stood in the doorway this morning and watched two chickens unsuccessfully search for a dry place to preen.

I’m struck by how relatively unaffected I’ve been by the storm. Other than dreams of sunshine and lectures I’ve prepared in my mind targeted at global warming nay-sayers, I’m comfortable in my fleece pants with a cup of tea in a draft-free (relatively drip-free) house, guarding all the instruments from the music program (I currently have 9 guitars, a set of bongoes, a jembe drum, and 4 congo drums drying out in my bedroom- as our music classroom’s broken windows let in moisture), and banking on my backup margarine and rice supply to sustain me through whatever tempest comes my way.

And for those in my community who are losing so much more to these rains… crops, homes, family members… I hope, I wish, for blue skies…