My house flooded

Last Thursday was a fun night. I went to bed outside, feeling slightly sickly and with a wary half-eye towards the sky. The wind was whipping and it was cloudy, but I risked it anyway because the inside of my house was hot. I had to move inside a little while later when the rain started, and laid on a mat in the room with the door-the coolest room in my little 3-room hut. The wind got ferocious and soon the rain was coming down heavily, and it started coming under the door. More specifically, dripping from the top of my house, through the door frame and onto the floor. My door was shut tight but it didn't stop the water, which started inching into the room. I had seen this once before, during site visit, but it wasn't bad, so I went back to sleep, exhausted and nauseous.

I woke up who knows how long later and felt the mat-totally soaked, meaning water had reached the other side of the room...and suddenly 1:30 am found me herding my floor-bound possessions (my mat, magazines, books and boxes) to a drier room, only slightly drier though. Water was dripping in through the windows in the other 2 rooms.

I peeked outside the door, braving the whipping winds and flying dried millet stalks, to check out my yard. It was also flooded, and I had to wade through the water to free some rocks from their spot under my gate to let the water out, lest it get any higher and start spilling over my porch and into my house.

I moved to my bed to sleep, under a window but dry. The wall under the window, though, had a steady drip of water going down it, eroding the mud, which was made easier because my whole house is infested with termites. I actually saw the termites crawling through their little tunnels in the wall trying to find a dry spot. gross.

Also, here's the thing about mud bricks- they're made of mud, water, and sun. Take away sun and add water again, and they tend to want to go back to their original state. This means that with every rain a little bit of the mud washes off houses and walls. Even with all the trouble people go to to reapply mud every year, most of it washes off. It also means that you're not only wading through water in your house the morning after a big storm-it's dirty, muddy water at that.

I spent the morning sweeping/mopping water out, and the house is still not totally dry.
That was a bona-fida flood on Thursday. The proof is still on the walls, a dark stain about an inch up. After a quick call to Peace Corps for advice, they told me to buy some tin to make a ledge above the door and windows (but that they won't reimburse me for it). I'm in San now to buy it, and hopefully it'll get installed before the next big rain.

In other news-the well was finished in 3 days! All it took was some motivated hard workers and a couple of bags of cement. And even with the rain, the cement still dried.