Rain, rain....

It has been raining here for over 4 days straight now. “but, Pete,” you may say, “you live in a rain forest, why is this of any interest to me?” Well, normally it rains here in the afternoons and evenings and clears up by morning. We live on a mountain and, normaly, as the clouds ascend for the day, everyone up the mountain gets fog followed by rain. That’s how it normally goes. This is something completely different.

In fact, the whole of Costa Rica has received what is normally the entire cumulative rainfall for November and most of December in the last 96 hours. I used to think that this was due to now Hurricane Tomas as it passed by, but I’m beginning to think that there is another system at play here.

I say that I THINK that because information is not too easy to come by here. Internet is spotty, as is electricity and access to water. The entire country is in a state of emergency. We will likely be fine, and by “we” I mean those of us nestled securely in the mountains. Those outlying, however, are experiencing landslides and flooding. The lower lying areas by the Panamanian border and Limon seem hit hardest. I shutter to think what’s going on in Haiti as Hurricane (class 1) Tomas is sitting just outside of Port-au-Prince. While we’re at it, I hope Cuba’s doing alright.

I think pretty strange for a Hurricane/Tropical storm to be on the western side of Hispaniola without going through the Dominican Republic to get there.

So, here’s the scene. We are sitting at home, waiting it out running around the house catching leaks with buckets. That’s about it. Last night I went ahead and made bread with the family as a rainy day activity. Tonight, we’re sitting - I want to venture out into the town and get some playing cards but the rain is just too hard tonight.

The main road to my town is apparently completely blocked off. Which means that they’ll have to send in a helicopter to get us out of here if it comes to that. Not that there’s anywhere it can land as the ground is saturated. Anyway, it won’t come to that as all of us good volunteers are hunkered down with our families translating news broadcasts from Spanish. Miraculously, I have internet, so I’m letting everyone know that, as far as I can tell, every volunteer is absolutely fine. Melana is also doing alright, occasionally I get about 2 minutes to talk to her before she looses phone service again.

All PCV/Ts are on an alert known as “Standfast”, formerly “Cod

e Yellow”. Which means we are restricted from leaving our communities and must be ready to move to a safer location at a moment’s notice. I don’t think it will come to that, if we moved up to “code orange” it would be the first time in the history of Peace Corps that Costa Rica hit above standfast. Unfortunately though, the standfast order does mean that the PCV picnic was canceled, so I hope that get’s rescheduled.

Oh well, I could use a few days of rest anyhoo.

For more on the storm, you can read about it here (that means click on the pink "here" for my less computer savvy readers!)