When it rains, it pours...

So I left off with the disastrous field trip.  And you know they always say when it rains, it pours?  Well, in this case it was quite literal.
Tuesday night we all stayed late at school because we had a silly skit night.  One of the parents and her highschooler son were driving my roommate and I home because it was late and the buses were no longer running.  Well, it had rained all day long and was still raining when we left school.  I made a comment about when we got in the car.  To which the highschool boy negated my comment about the unusual amount of rain by simply stating it is rainy season.  (Which I did know, but it usually only rains for a few hours in the afternoon,not all day). 
Anyway, I went to bed that night, and I didn't sleep well and I remember thinking many times in my half asleep state "It is still raining." 
 Well, morning came and I was ready to go to school and celebrate my birthday with my students.  That's when my roommate knocked on my door and said "Look out your window."  I did and this is what I saw...


This picture doesn't do it justice... It was literally waist deep...

Normal view for comparison purposes :)

Um, scary!  It was definitely a shock to see the water so high.  We could see in the houses across the street, and there must have been over 2 feet of water inside.   There was no way to get out of our apartment.  I was just thankful we were on the second floor!  We called the director who informed us that there wouldn't be school due to flooding all around Xela. 

Here's some pics of the water coming up the steps of our apartment.

During...

 And as the waters are receeding...  (You can see the water line on the wall)

                                     


Water spewing out of the bottom apartment... We saw literal waterfalls coming out of the houses across the street.

  There are a lot of reasons why Xela floods , but I think the reason why this one was really bad was because it was in the middle of the night and all the trash and debris blocked up the not-that-great-to-begin-with drainage system.   And everyone was sleeping, so nobody helped to clear the drains.  It really was a crazy day.  Just being trapped in side and seeing the enormous amount of damage to people's houses.  We heard stories about people waking up and their belongings were just floating around them. 
And this isn't clean water we're talking about.  The mud left behind was ridiculous.  Like literally six inches of mud on our street.  Disgusting.  That caused other problems and we didn't have school on Thursday either.  And the government here does nothing about it...either preventative or post flood.  The people that live on the street had to pay a lot of their own out of pocket money (which they don't have much of)  to hire a bulldozer to spend three days plowing mud.  The city did nothing about it. 
It really was damaging...people lost a lot of their belongings and some even lost lives.  I think the news reports said about 25 or so people died...
So it was kind of a depressing birthday.  But it was nice to have the day off of school and to relax.  And I recounted many times that day how much I have to be thankful for.  And I did have a student call me (still a mystery as to how they got my phone number) to wish me a happy birthday and "send me a hug".  That was sweet. 
My class birthday party at Pizza Hut :) got postponed.  But students have been bringing in little gifts all week.  They do make birthdays quite special here.

In other flood news, my classroom did sustain a bit of damage.  Turtle was okay... Embarassingly that was my first concern when the director called to let me know that there was at least an inch of water in my classroom.   But all of my supplemental teacher workbooks that were sitting in their cardboard display boxes behind my desk got soaked through.  As well most of the bottom shelf of my classroom library.  It was a sad sight.  But several people helped me to spread out the books in the board room with a heater and fan on them for two days... They look pretty messed up, but still functional.  As for the kids books...Another teacher and I hung string all around my room and had them drying out the past few days.  Unfortunately there are several casualties of books where pages stuck together and ripped.  Also, my classroom rug and carpet squares got soaked and have been out to "dry", but haven't yet seeing as there hasn't been sun for about a week.  My room smells pretty wretched, and there is white mold fuzz growing out of the floor.  But could have been worse.



The road to school...This one is courtesy of another teacher.

 Here's to hoping rainy season is rapidly approaching its end!!