Rainy Season

So we have officially entered the rainy months in Guatemala. Before leaving a friend warned me about this lovely time of year. I am pretty sure her exact words were “everything feels wet, all the time.” I thought that was a joke, but alas, uh, the only way to make that statement more accurate would be to say “everything feels wet, forever. You will feel like you will never wear dry clothes again.” I don’t so much mind the rain; I actually really like the noise of the drops on the tin roof, it makes for quite a nice lullaby. Sometimes though, we catch the tail end of tropical storms. That is some scary business. The rain gets so loud you can’t hear anything. The power goes out, the lightning strikes impossibly close; the only light before the world goes dark again. Oh, and the wind. The wind is so strong that it actually broke one of our windows a few weeks ago.

The rain also affects a lot of things that I have never really had to give any thought to before. There are bad landslides here, and apparently in my department we are often hit the worst and have the most landslides. We have already had several people die this year because the mountain started to give way and literally washes the road away. The other side of the lake tends to get it much worse than mine it seems. My friend Colleen has to take a pickup (in Spanish it’s picop, I love Spanglish!) to her site from where she restocks. If it’s raining the roads get so bad so quickly that she is stuck in her restocking town. Also, there are quite a few earthquakes here. Though that has nothing to do with the rain, it’s something that I have never really dealt with before. Last week we have a 5.6 point earthquake. I don’t exactly know what that means, all I know is that I keep waking up to them, and my sleep brain clearly has no idea how to process what’s happening. The first earthquake that woke me up was a few months ago, and in my half sleep state of mental fog I was convinced that Ptolemy, my morbidly obese cat in the states, had jumped on the bed (apparently the ongoing shaking was just reverberations? Saber). After about five seconds of continuing I realized how ridiculous that was, clearly there was someone under my bed shaking it. Sleep thinking is hard. 

http://www.ibtimes.com/five-dead-guatemalan-landslide-after-heavy-rains-1592833