Residents have a variety of strategies for coping with the transformation. The simplest being to sing a self-comforting song about how much you love your neighborhood in order to provide courage to get through the ridiculousness of living on dirt roads. (The guy I witnessed singing on an early morning was particularly cheerful. He wore a broad smile and had his pants rolled high around the knees. He was trying hard to convince himself that his neighborhood was number 1.) Other methods include digging trenches or building mounds to try and control the direction of the running water. Where accumulation is inevitable, walking paths are created with plywood planks or well placed stones.
Of course, there is the traditional sandbag method- rice bags, in our case, filled with dirt (most likely- and somewhat ironically- from the very road itself.) More intensive measures include having a cement barrier put in around your entrance. This results in the need to step up and over and then down into your doorway. It seemed like such an odd arrangement when I first moved here, but now I understand.
We are mound builders on my road. Or rather, someone is a mound builder. I am not sure who the mystery person is that creates the mound faithfully throughout the rainy season, but I have gratefully benefited from its presence. It prevents the water from turning down the road and instead forms a bank- guiding the river to continue straight past our houses and off into the bush area before the lagoon.
This past weekend- well, for the past several weekends, really- the rain has been steadily falling from gray skies. It feels a bit like early spring in the US- still very cold, but with an air of growth and hopefulness. On Saturday night it rained particularly hard. There was force and continuity for hours. And even when it slowed down, there was a quiet stream of water falling.
Early Sunday morning we were up having breakfast (4 am suhoor ) and the rain was calm. I stayed awake for another hour or so before returning to cozy down with Mbalia with visions of a lazy Sunday morning. I still managed to wake before her and wondered about the time. I stuck my hand out from under the mosquito net to reach for my phone and felt an icy cold surprise. My phone was floating in about 2 inches of water.
My mattress, which is really just a piece of blue foam on the floor, had become an island sponge in the middle of my bedroom. The computer, some favorite books and piles of clothes were all drifting along or soaking up water. An extension cord caught my eye and I wasn't really sure if I should step off the mattress. I remembered my hand splashing around in a blind search for my phone and deemed it mostly safe.
Once I overcame my electrocution fears, I was ready to brave the water and survey the damage. All three bedrooms were flooded. The living room and kitchen had much less water, suggesting the house is built on a slant? I didn't really know where to begin. I started by trying to save the things that were sitting on the floor getting water-logged, which was just about everything since the floor is our biggest piece of furniture.
After rescuing most of my paintings, baskets of important papers and throwing soaked blankets into the washrooms- which were ironically dry- I grabbed the mop. When I first moved to Africa, I remember resisting the mopping method. I searched everywhere for my traditional image of a mop- round head with straggly cords coming off that I could swish back and forth. It was not to be found. The squeegee on a stick is the preferred method.
The squeegee is paired with a soft cloth that gets dipped in soapy water (if you're lucky. In many cases, the water is just sprinkled across the floor- soap or not- sometimes just a water/bleach mix which is hard on the olfactory nerves) and the cloth is laid down. The squeegee goes on top, the cloth gets draped over an edge and the whole contraption is pushed around the floor.
I understand the concept now and I am mostly proficient with it, but in those first weeks I longed for nothing more than my familiar mop (and broom. There's a parallel tale to the sweeping techniques here but it doesn't exactly fit in this story.)
On this wet morning, however, the squeegee was exactly the tool I needed. Ousmane grabbed a bowl and a bucket and began bailing out the house like a sinking ship. I corralled and cajoled the water through the doorways and out the main entrance. In a few hours, we managed to take back control.
By then the rain had slowed, the water levels in the yard had receded and the mound man was back on duty.
Photo walk of my journey to school each morning:
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| Just outside the door- a bit of water but I am headed in the other direction |
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| The first stretch- muddy: rich, deep, sink-up-to-your-ankles, stick-to-the- bottom-of-your-shoes mud |
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| A cute little road stream with impromptu stone bank |
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| The first of the bigger sized ponds |
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| Requires a glance ahead to find the best hop-skip-jump path |
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| Reflective views lend a cheery air to the wet morning |
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| Always need to take in the bigger picture so you can plan the best route |
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| The biggest and riskiest lake chance of getting a shoe soak: high |
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| Stone path, one person passage |
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| Hug the wall and make sure no cars are coming- miniature tsunami if one drives through while you are on the high wire |
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| The last section of pond-puddles to navigate before the main road- usually requires a bit of zig-zagging to get there |
