The Walls are Leaking

The walls are leaking.  My bed is wet. My xi-xi bucket is filling up with water I’m collecting from where the roof is letting water drip into my room.  I thought that Sandy, the impending “perfect storm” ominously situated over the entire east coast was supposed to be bad; but then I found out what the worst parts of the Mozambican Rainy Season were really like. 

As my former home braced for impact, my new home didn’t even see it coming.  Just another storm we thought: Some rain, some mud, and complete certainty that we’d lose power.  When the gloomy storm clouds over Namaacha finally decided to empty their bowels right on tops of us, Hurricane Sandy began to traverse the DC Metropolitan area.  The lights barely flickered on Longwood Drive, all the while I found myself using a broom to battle a flash flood of water that was trying to breach the top of a temporary dam I had built from rocks, sandals and socks to guard the entrance of my host family’s African shack.  Once the front was secure, I went to place buckets inside the house to catch water that was leaking from the roof, walls, and floor (the water entering from the later method proved to be most difficult to catch; I blame gravity for that one).  The rain continued for about a half hour, carving out miniature canyons in the earth as rivers of mud, rock, and rain began to form and flow down the hill of our mountain-side machamba (for those that don’t know, I live on a farm on the side of a rolling mountain). The flashing lighting that was accompanied by a ferocious thunder and torrential downpour made me feel oddly close to home.  After all, I thought, how funny that my American family was supposedly going through the same exact thing. 

When the storm finally passed and the skies cleared up, we had a chance to inspect the damage.  Apparently, this has been the worst rain Namaacha had seen since 2005. One of our freshly plowed fields (my Pai is planning on planting peanuts, or amendoim) was transformed into a sea of mud (matope!).  Because it was completely compacted, the soil would have to be turned over again.  This is done by hand with a hoe-like tool called an enxada.  It’s a lot of back-breaking, bending-over work that really sucks doing.  But, he barely shrugged after acknowledging that all the hard work he had just put in was all for naught. He just accepted it.  Alas, that’s life here; and life goes on.

While we had been victorious at keeping the water from flowing into our house, our casa de banho wasn’t so lucky.  The matope river had decided that it would flow right on through our ghetto little bathing shack and left behind about two inches of mud caked to the cement floor.  Here’s a picture!

Matope Central