Rain Stories

I'm sorry it's been a little while, I'll try to sum up lots of little things that have happened.

Most people have heard that we had a visit from Tropical Storm Agatha, and that a giant sinkhole in the capitol swallowed a building... That didn't really affect me except that for two days it poured rain like I've never seen, and the next week they cancelled school for all the public schools. There were some areas that were really damaged, and I think over 100 people died, but none of that was anywhere near me, and the volunteers who are in areas that were in danger were consolidated to a safe point near their sites. We have really good emergency plans here, so I don't worry too much about these kinds of events.

Speaking of rain, I don't remember if I've described how it rains here, but I'm going to now, so sorry if I'm repeating myself. It almost never rains in the mornings, only in the afternoons and nights. It usually starts around two or three and it's usually only an hour or so, but some days it is flash-flood type rain. On Tuesday I was in the big city nearby, Chimaltenango (which is also the name of the department), when the rain started. I had made a calculated risk by leaving my rain pants behind and only bringing my rain jacket, but that was because it hadn't been raining hard since the tropical storm. So the moment I stepped off the bus the downpour started, and within a couple minutes I discovered that despite the large quantity of rain that they get, that city is not built to deal with it very well. It turns out that people like to throw their garbage in the street, and it tends to get into the stormdrains and clog them up. So five minutes after the rain started the streets were rivers about 6 inches deep, and intersections were about a foot deep where the two rivers met. The Guatemalans are accustomed to this kind of rain, and their strategy is just to stop wherever they are and wait for it to pass. I, of course, do not have that kind of patience since I come from Oregon where it tends to never stop raining, so I just kept on going through the rain and the rivers. I had some idea that my REI rain jacket would keep me dry enough as long as I darted from awning to awning. Unfortunately, most of the awnings are only about a foot wide, so I found myself in the waterfall coming off the awning as often as not. Long story short, I was completely soaked within about four minutes. I still stopped under awnings because it felt like a place to rest, and when I did I would smile and say hello to the group of Guatemalans that had chosen that place to wait out the storm. Then I would smile at them and jump (usually literally, the sidewalks are not really flat so much as they are a series of uncomfortably tall stairs up and then down and then back up again because every store put it its own sidewalk at a different level) back out into the rain and the rivers.

Eventually I got to my destination, the grocery store, around which there were about 25 people because they have an especially big awning. I went inside with my jeans plastered onto my legs and my shoes sloshing at every step (I had ended up just walking through the rivers at the intersections, because there seemed to be no other option). I started walking around, stopping every once in a while to see if I wanted to buy any of the things in front of me, and after about a minute the woman whose job it was to mop the floors found me and started following me around. I would stand for ten seconds looking for things to buy, and then move on leaving a several foot wide puddle of water, which she would immediately mop up. She pretty much just followed me around until I was done and checked out, at which point I'm assuming she breathed a sigh of relief and went to take a break since no one else was going to be coming into the store until the rain stopped... I felt kind of bad for creating a small brook in her territory, but there really wasn't anything else I could do.

I went back out into the rain, walked down the middle of the main street (the very middle of the streets were usually okay for walking because the city engineers at least had the foresight to make them slope to both sides) back to the bus stop, and caught a bus back to my town. I should mention that I somehow ended up with a window seat and that a high school aged girl in a school uniform who had somehow avoided getting wet in the rain sat down next to me. Unfortunately for her, all Guatemalans instinctively want to sit three to a seat, so a woman sat down next to her, smashing her into my soaked-body. Nothing I could do about that either. Sometimes you're just soaked-to-the-bone on a bus in Guatemala and people just have to deal with it.