Rain.

It rained again yesterday. Like, properly. In the month that I´ve been here, we have had two proper bouts of rain. By that I mean that it has started with crazy heavy rain and continued for several days, with breaks in between. Last time my room got soaked because of holes in the roof, that have since been repaired. This time my roof didn´t leak, but the garden flooded and all the water came into our sitting room and our bedrooms. Brown, smelly water. Luckily I was at work. Unfortunately for my lovely, heroic Spanish housemates, they weren´t. By the time I got home, the gate had been sandbagged, the water cleaned out and the floors mopped with bleach by the girls and our landlord/boss José.

José hard at work

I always wanted a pond in my garden.

Meanwhile, in school, everyone managed to keep classes going as one classroom flooded and all the outdoor spaces became water features. The school is small, not all connected by corridors and some classrooms are open to the elements so going from class to class involved getting drenched. But at least the rain wasn´t cold.

As it was Friday, I went for a lovely lunch with a colleague and to her house, smug in my Penney´s raincoat while everyone was wearing bin bags. But alas, my Penney´s raincoat was a load of shite and my phone got soaked in my pocket. Karma. So it is now sitting in rice and every now and then it starts speaking randomly. Anyway, back at Casa Paz (where I live), we are an industrious little laundry trying to clean all the dirty smelly sheets and towels used to stem the flow of shite water into our bedrooms by the wonderful Spaniards. There are piles of clothes, rugs, towels and bedsheets waiting to be washed. We are boiling water on the stove to make the manual washer a little more effective. Let´s just hope it doesn´t rain again tonight.

It´s a sunny day today and we are going to spend the afternoon at the beach and go out tonight, so all is good. There´s no point getting worked up over rain, and I was lucky only my phone got broken and not more stuff. There isn´t really any point getting worked up about anything here - so much stuff is out of your control. Life in the Carribean is a good exercise in patience and acceptance. And when things get overwhelmingly frustrating and I really need to get away from it all, I can go to a nice house of a friend or treat myself to a pizza and wine in a nice restaurant , unlike most people living here. And I have those lovely, industrious Spanish shite-water mopper-uppers, without whom this flood would have been inifintely worse for me. ¡Gracias amigas!