Saturday, June 14, 2008

Rainy Season

Friday, May 30th: Yesterday we welcomed the first rains of this year’s rainy season which officially began May 15th. The weather station said we were getting the back side of the Pacific tropical storm which jumped the gun on the official hurricane season which isn’t scheduled to arrive until June 1st Whether related to the rains or not, I don’t know, but we were without electricity for 8 hours on Wednesday and four hours on Thursday. And piped water’s been out for two days. That means there’s no water flowing from the village water tank to the pipes in people’s yards. The lack of pipe water is a common occurrence so most villagers have rain water collection systems. Electricity blackouts are also common. For most of us, having water is more important than having power. But for the handful of small restaurant owners, the lack of refrigeration is a huge blow. We are also noticing shortages in food staples like rice and flour. A friend who runs a nature preserve on one of the small islands called to say they were low on rice and couldn’t find any in nearby coastal towns. Water, power, food – for right now there’s a shortage of all these things in Belize. And I suppose in many other parts of the world, too. If this current plague of scarcities is weather-related, maybe the coming of the rainy season will heal our hurts.

Friday, June 6: One week after I wrote the above entry, my area of Belize experienced terrific flooding – a backlash of Atlantic tropical storm Arthur. Moderate rains fell all day Saturday and they increased to heavy downpours on Sunday. By Monday morning the nearby Sittee River was completely out of its banks and was soon to flood several villages and threaten others.

Early Monday afternoon a neighbor child came to my door to tell me that the other side of our village was flooding. We ran down to the Police Station where many of the villagers had gathered. That’s when we learned that the road connecting our village to the only highway in southern Belize was inundated (which incidentally meant that even those who had cars had no access out of our area). And sure enough, as we stood there trying to comprehend the severity of the situation, we watched the waters not rushing, but definitely rising along the main road and in the fields. By 6 pm that evening water surrounded all our homes and invaded those homes not on stilts (probably a third of the 600+ structures).

The clean up goes on. School never opened Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday we tried to conduct classes with about half the student body and half of the teachers (7 of the 15 teachers commute from nearby villages and they had no access into our village). The first thing the older boys did on Wednesday was to dig out drainage canals so that the water standing in front of the school would have someplace to go. I spent my time mopping up the library – the one that we opened only two weeks ago. (More about the library next time: It’s great – thanks to my friend Pam Causer, who sent me six boxes of books, all of which are still dry and in good condition!)