Now isn't that one scary lion? Could that be Aslan?
We got back from church on Wednesday to find our own tiny personal tragedy. It rained, like it only rains in the middle of a tropical rain forest. It rained, well cats and dogs is such a cliché, and really doesn’t do it justice, so, it rained cows and camels. It gave me a little bit more sympathy for the people in New Orleans. Ok, it wasn’t quite on the scale of Katrina. But the back house and the yard was full of water, calf high. (That’s like my calf, and not a cow’s calf.)
Because we don't have the roof on the second floor, and we have no glass in the windows, the water runs down the wall and into the house. Our living room was full of water too.
The puppies were in the water, and Hannah took them and blow dried them and got them dried off.
We live right near the Marco Zero Monument, and all around the monument is parking lot. The city planners, in their wisdom, took the water from the whole area, and ran it under the road and dumped it right by our street. It is quite unbelievable how much water just flows down our street. Many times it just takes part of the street with it. In fact, when it is raining, it is hard to recognize it as a street. The phrase “A River Runs Through It” comes to mind.
Well, the neighbor next to us doesn’t have the wall around his property completely done. (Here, everyone that has the financial means puts a wall around their house to keep the petty thieves out and very large and vicious dogs in.) That huge torrent overran the little gutter carved in the street, and flooded his yard. As his land slopes down, it filled with water, and as the rest of his land has a wall, it started filling up like a very muddy swimming pool, and started filling the house he has on the back of his property.
To relieve the flooding, he broke the wall between our properties. So then our yard started looking like the Amazon River, deep and wide and very brown. Since I wasn’t at home to know that he had so graciously blessed us with holes in our walls and enough water to get a good start on a lake, it filled the back house, the septic tank was under water, and a lot of stuff got wet. A YWAM couple from a Vineyard in New Zealand had stored some stuff here while they are back in New Zealand for home assignment, and everything on the bottom got wet. We have been cleaning things up and trying to dry stuff out for the last couple of days. Kind of hard to do when it is like 85% humidity and rains every day. We finally got some sun today, and got some stuff dried out.
Here I am, breaking the wall on the other side, to allow the water to drain.
On a scale, this was pretty small time stuff. And yet, it has been a real pain, and has given us lots of extra work, and we have lost some stuff, some documents of ours got wet. I can’t even imagine what people in New Orleans must be going through. I’ll tell you, I don’t think I would go back. I would try to find someplace that is above sea level at least :-)
A group of young people from Oregon sent some clay for the girls. Here are a few of their creations.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Friday, December 30, 2005
