Water water everywhere

So how is everybody doing? As is becoming the norm its been awhile since my last blog and a long while since my last significant blog with much worth reading. Lydia has surpassed me in blogging as of late and she has a great way of telling stories so make sure you keep checking out her page as I slowly drift off into obscurity. I'm still banking on the possibility that once I can write my blogs at home or whenever the inspiration hits me I will be back to my old self. My tired old laptop will arrive in the next few weeks so we will see.

This past Saturday held an interesting surprise. I got up to work out in the morning, took at bath, ate breakfast, etc, Just like any normal Saturday. I was sitting on the porch with Lydia watching one of the first heavy daytime rains of the year come down and everyone was enjoying what can for some in the country can be the difference between eating well and being hungry. No doubt we need a lot of rain for the rice, p-nuts, ect. but we ended up with a tad too much. My host brothers had gone and barricaded the door to the compound on the command of my host father. The Idea was to try to stem the flow of water rushing in from the street which had by this time turned to a river. This was the first indication that the rainstorm might yield something out of the ordinary. I climbed up on a pile of rocks at the corner of the compound to look over the wall with my host father and the entire street had turned into a rushing brown river. The street has always been a bit of a river during heavy rains but it never looked like it did this week. After some time I got down and was sitting on the porch when my host father asked me to look behind our house to see if the water was rising. Sure enough just about the time I got to the back door water was beginning to gush in around the sides of the door. First we tried to open up the drain hole in the wall at the end of the house with a pick axe and then we did that in a few other places around the compound to help the flow of water but that helped only minimally since basically a big section of the neighborhood drains into our street and has nowhere to go. So at this point all of our host family and then some started helping us move everything out of the house. We had to take pretty much every item onto the front porch or raise it up somehow. The bucket brigade went on for quite some time while we tried to win the battle with the water. Bucket after bucket was shuttled out the front door and into an area where it could drain away. While all this was going on a bunch of other people from our neighborhood who were also trying to save their houses/belongings were out on the road with shovels and pick axes trying to undo the major technical flaws that were put in place when a "storm sewer" was recently built by the main road. The first time I have ever heard of a sewer actually making drainage worse. That combined with the destruction of a wall that normally kept some of the water out from behind our house were the main causes of flooding in our house I think. Once some of these problems were fixed by bruit force and the rain let up a bit the water began to reseid. That's when we all started to win the war with the water in the house. After we had cleaned up as much as we could with buckets our host family and us started to rip up the flooring (which i hated anyway) and mop up the rest of the water. Its was pretty awesome how everybody helped us out. You would be surprised how quickly 20 pairs of hands can finish a job that would have taken Lydia and I a few days. We went from the beginning of the flood to most things being cleaned up and put back in the house in about 5 hours I guess. Pretty crazy. At that point we figured that everybody was tired and the rest of the day, including our host sisters nursery school graduation thing, was shot. But no, somehow my older host sister managed to keep cooking during the flood. Lunch was served on time and we headed out to the nursery school shortly after. Just another day in The Gambia. When you grow up and live in a place where there are no civil engineers (think drainage plan) and no emergency response teams you basically band together solve problems as they are presented in the most direct way possible and move on to the next thing. I never saw anybody feeling sorry for themselves during this fiasco just determination to solve the problem. We were the lucky ones. The compound behind us ended up with chest deep water in their house and many things ruined. Our plan is to make up some sand bags and keep them on standby in case of another problem.

After Saturday we enjoyed a basically relaxing Sunday with some left over clean up and had another PC friend over for dinner in the evening. This week is going well and pretty busy. Lydia in particular seems to be running around in many different directions with exams at the college and work continuing at the nursery school. The college was out of internet access the early part of this week (more on that later) but we found plenty of things to work on around campus. Getting the last of the computers into our domain and things are running smoothly. Funding has finally been secured for our irrigation system along with some other things at the beekeepers. So after a year we are back in talks with some contractors to install the rope pump and tank. Hopefully you will hear more about that in the next month but the best laid plans get sidetracked in The Gambia. Over the last month or so I have been talking with a Agriculture student in his last year at the college about doing a project for his final paper. I was interested in building a bio-digester to produce bio-gas so I talked to the head of the agriculture department and told him to send anybody who might be interested to see me. The student seems very smart and motivated so our plan is to build a semi-portable unit that will be build from locally available materials (probably 55 gallon drums) and will produce methane cooking gas by fermenting cow dung. The idea is to use the unit we build as a demonstration to show the concept to other agencies and or individuals that may be interested in building one or making a business or development project out of it. The Gambia has a major problem with deforestation which is largely due to harvesting of firewood for cooking. The vast majority of Gambians, I would say in excess of %90, cook over a wood fires or charcoal. These are plenty of goats, sheep, and cows around and not much of the dung is used for anythings so it has the potential to be a good fuel source in the right situation. Like I said its a demo so we will make it and see where it goes from there.

Question: What do you think it would be like if the internet went out for several days in all of America? Seems like a crazy question and if it did actually happen it would probably trigger an economic slide of monumental proportions but its unlikely to happen so no worries. Starting this past weekend (due partly to the same storm that flooded our house) the Internet connection for the whole country went out. It was out for 3 days. There is basically a single point of failure for all the internet connections in the country. When that goes it all goes. Apparently this time a bridge fell down in the storm and was lying on top of the cable so that was hindering the effort.

This weekend we are going to go up to the capitol to celebrate the 4th. There should be quite a few other volunteers in town and there are rumors of a softball game being planned so it should be fun. The new education group of PCVs is also coming in tomorrow so we will have a chance to meet them. That was us a year ago. Congratulations to Mark and Jenn on their wedding. Again, sorry we missed it, I'm sure it was awesome. I hear my dad made a great speech at the wedding. Can anybody YouTube that for me?