The rainy season officially started in April, but in the last three weeks the rainfall has picked up (or down?). Just about every day, the faucet in the skies opens between noon and four, and usually keeps going until nightfall. This will continue through November.
Most people can predict the skies pretty well, and go home from the fields or town before it starts coming down hard. However, it is considered normal to seek shelter in anyone’s house along the way as well. I got stuck in a stranger’s house during rainstorm for a few hours and she kept feeding me boiled green bananas and really wanted me to spend the night. I have also hosted strangers on my porch for extended periods of time, breaking down to local customs and offering them coffee and food.
My community has been told for ten months now that the government funded aqueduct project will be starting any day now. The contractors arrived 2 weeks ago, and started driving materials up the muddy rutted road last week. So far, the majority of my community’s work has consisted of rehabilitating the washouts on the road that was constructed in January. Yesterday 3 pick axes snapped in the process of chipping away a rock blocking the road. The contractor claims he has 15 days to bring in the materials and construct the spring captation and the tank and connect 16 houses. However, we’ll see how that goes because it is already Day 5 and not all of the materials have been delivered yet.
Project construction relies on volunteer manual labor from the community. Many men are planning to leave the community soon to go harvest coffee in Costa Rica for three months. Two of my neighbors have already mentioned to me they are going to try to stay around to work on the project, although this means they will lose their work opportunity in Costa Rica. To me, this shows how important the water project is to community members, as they are willing to sacrifice their only income of the year. Let´s just hope the morale keeps up through Day 15.
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