The Rain

When they made jokes about volunteers beginning to shine any wood furniture in their house with their chap-stick due to weeks of rain in training, I didn’t believe it. The rains, when they came, were indeed ample at that time, but they went as fast as they came, and we were back to the heat.

They didn’t lie. I am now on my second day of rain, after a short 3 day break from 4 straight days of rain. And when I say a day of rain, I mean it has been raining all day, pouring at times, misting at others, with plenty of lightening and thunder interspersed. Since I am in Paraguay, this also means that life as I know it shuts down. The road becomes a mud-slide slalom for only the bravest or foolish moto-driver, school closes, meetings are canceled, and the world around me becomes muddy, wet, and freezing cold. (or around 45 degrees, which, without heat, feels close to freezing.)

In a way, it’s nice. On rainy days, nothing is expected of me. If I am not careful, I expect little of myself (the clouds, the mud, the families not leaving their own homes makes it uninspiring for me to do the same). You get into a rainy day zone, although it sometimes takes me a moment to remember were the rain leaks into my house and move my chair in time to not get wet. I do crafts, I plan charlas, I now surf the internet (something I only do on rainy days since it takes so long for random pages to load when I have things to do), I bake, I talk on my cell phone an obscene amount, and I head over in my mud boots to sit around the fogon with my host mom, drink mate, and talk about the latest family gossip (today’s conversation included my host sister’s new love interest, a local 19 year old police officer from the town over). And then, I go to bed ridiculously early, after tucking Tony into his bed (he gets cold too!) only to somehow wake up late the next day.


Short times seem long. And then you realize it is. Who knows if this is a standard Paraguayan winter, they cannot even remember what it was like last year (I think its an effect of the extreme heat during the summer. And after days of thinking “well, at least the garden is happy” I just went outside to see that many of my little plants succumbed to mud flows and drowned leaves.


Luckily there’s mate, fireside chats, and many warm blankets to bide the time until the sun returns, my world dries again, and I am far too busy to remember the down, although moist, times.

One day, between the rain, we got a little work done. Here are some kids at the school building a compost pile in front of the school garden we made!