Rain Rain Rain

It's the wet season, and it has been for a while. The rainy season is anywhere between November and April. We definitely noticed in November, that almost every afternoon, it'd be stormy with thunder, lightning and rain, and then the days were sunny and humid.

When we were on holiday in NZ over Christmas we'd hear people say, boy it's humid today. Pha! Humid? New Zealand. Get a grip. Humid is living in a sauna.... all day. In NZ, if I ever went into a sauna, the cool thing is, than 5 minutes later you can get out, and your skin feels refreshed, and you hit the cold night air at the hot pools you are visiting (because that's the only time and the only place I would ever be near a sauna). So you get transported instantly from humidity to beautifully cool and fresh. Here you open the door of your sauna, only to find that outside, it's a sauna too. It's humid. And after a year or so of living in a sauna, then you get to have a reprieve when you go on holiday to a non-humid country, like NZ. Moral of the story, people who live in NZ don't know the meaning of the word "humid".

As I was saying, before I got onto a tangent, the wet season is terrible for being humid. All that rain, then all that sun, it'll hit 35 degrees or so. Boy, that's a recipe for a humid disaster.

But for a week now, we haven't had this stormy afternoon, rainy night and hot humid days, we've just had plain, straight, non-stop, Rain Rain Rain. Honestly, almost all day and night for the past seven days it's been rainy. There's been a few moments or hours of just spitting, or dark scary clouds, but for the most part it's been rainy. Steady and slow... or down right down pours!

On Friday for a few hours we had a bit of sun. The temperature went from 25 degrees to 35 degrees in 30 minutes. That was a killer, and that was humid. But it was good because it lasted long enough to get a few loads of washing dry that weren't drying in the wet 25 degree temperatures we were experiencing.

But now, it's back to rain rain rain. Everyone is curled up in their beds, not stirring, not venturing out. Locals hate it when it rains. It's so cold for them. 25 degrees means, for them, make a hot milo, get your blankets around you, and feel miserable because it's cold and wet. As one friend put it, "No eni wan lo hia seki seki" - no one's around here's moving at all.

To me it's luxurious, because it's cool. Hmmm 25 degrees. This is what I dream of for 337 days of the year (the days when it's 35 degrees).

Anyway, the week was a bit of a blur (rain). Wednesday we spent most of the day trying to keep Theresa entertained at court while we waited for a chance for our case to be heard.

At 3:15 finally the judge came to hear our piece, well, of course, our lawyer did all the talking. And he did it well. Anyway, after 26 minutes of explaining why we fit all the legal requirements to adopt Theresa, the judge said, ok, I'll have a look at the application and get back to you! What?! Apparently, that's normal. So now we have to wait more. How long? He didn't give any indication. Hmph!

Thursday I visited Bethesda Disability Centre to drop off a friend. Ok, we'd had bad rain, and it was pooling up in a few areas:

but after we unblocked the drains, our water flowed away out to sea with all the other surplus water that's been hanging around Lungga. Bethesda however is a different story. They get all these small creeks that flow into their property when the creeks overflow, plus rain, and compound that with the fact that they don't have any place for the water to run. Equals - they had a lot of water around the place. The water came up to my knees when I was walking around the property. They were moving things out of the office and up onto tables, because the water was flooding the place... maybe about hmm... 7cm to 10cm as a guess. Not that much, I suppose, but enough to be annoying and have to move things around.

I snapped these photos.

It feels unreal in a sense. In NZ, well, where I grew up, we never had floods. Rain didn't effect us that much. Here it's a way of life. Most houses are off the ground on poles. Floods are devastating. They come. They destroy. Everything gets wet, ruined or mouldy. Then they go.

And you move on. It certainly teaches you not to hold on to possessions. If it's not the moths getting in to them, or the rust destroying them, it's the water. So don't get to hung up about them, you know what I mean? Someone said to us before we came here, don't take anything with you onto the mission field, that you don't mind losing. Cos it might get stolen, broken, damaged, destroyed. But I think that's good advice for life. Don't have anything that you don't mind losing. Because, it's not worth holding onto something so tight that you lose out in your relationship with God.