avoiding the fishbowl: Sara's Ark

A lot has happened in the last month, but I don't think anyone would have the patience to actually read all that there is write so I'll limit it to one story. Here goes...

The main even that took place was the flooding of my community during record setting rains on Mothers Day. The river rose around 35 feet or so in a 36 hour period, but it was a combined effort of past rain saturating the soil and extreme rain in the last hours leading up to the water invasion. I had made it back to site the night of the 7th in possibly a questionable trip across the lake and up the river to find that the water level was already high enough to be lapping at the post of my neighbors house. I changed into warm clothes and went to bed thinking that all the water would subside by morning....and then 5am came along. I woke up to voices speaking in the Embera dialect and got up knowing there would be only one reason for this kind of stirring. The water had rose all the way up to my post and had entered the house of my neighbors, Poliester and Dina. Around 8 people were busy evacuating both the people from the flooding house as well as all of the belongings possible. Around 7am it looked like the water was going back down, so I went back to bed to grab another couple of hours of sleep. Wrong, I woke up an hour later to voices ycalling my name telling me to get up because my house was going to go under. So I got up to find that the water was only around 2 feet under my floor and it was still raining like mad with little likelihood of clearing up. I grabbed the most important things I had and stuffed them in a backpack and with my cat under one arm I jumped out of my house into almost waist high water to get to dryer ground. Within an hour it became clear that the water was going to enter my house and it only took one exchanged glance with my main counterpart for him to yell out "La casa de sara! Vamos! Vamos!" This meant that we got into a canoe and boated over to my place to evacuate my belongings. If my house was going to flood and possibly get swept away by the river, no one wanted to see my stuff go with it.

After all was cleared out an on higher ground, a couple of us stayed in the house to make sure the floor did not float away. Luckily by 2pm or so the water level began to drop and by 5pm the river had lowered out of all houses and left them relatively in tact as well. I was a little hesitant to move back into my abode, but with the rain only at a heavy drizzle it looked clear. I lost some food and a few books and such, but all of the important stuff was safe and just a little moist(or in some cases soaking, dripping wet). I can't say I slept well for the days or weeks following due to more incessant rain, but I think it won't come back like it did on Mother's Day.

An interesting fact is that the Canal closed down due to rainfall for the first time since it opened 100 years ago. That is a lot of rain.