Excitement

Written August 27, 2010

Life in La Unión is pretty quiet and some would probably even say boring. Although there’s not a whole lot going on here I would say life really isn’t boring. Maybe I’ve just come to appreciate the little excitement in life. These are things such as when my classroom is finally finished after the first 4 days of school are already done, when my British roommates find out they have gotten into university so we bake them a cake, even when the water isn’t thick and full of mud when I shower. I guess I’m just learning to slow down and appreciate the small things in life.

Other times truly dramatic things happen. On Thursday night Bryony and I were making tortillas outside of the house with the woman who cooks our food (yes, I know I’m spoiled) when a huge storm blew in. Now, this was a Texas sized storm, except in Texas you’re at sea level. Here, you are so high that you’re actually in the storm clouds. So, when there is thunder and lightning it is literally right there. The lightening is incredibly bright and the thunder deafening. So, as I tried to roll out and cook tortillas in this craziness a huge bolt of lightning struck really close to us. Bryony called it quits and went inside. It turns out the lightning struck the cell phone tower across the street.

You might think ok, bad storm, pretty exciting, story over. Right? Wrong. As we were finishing up the tortillas Osiris, the woman I live with, ran by yelling that their apartment was flooded. They live downstairs in an apartment they built next to the house and the four of us girls live in the house. However, they have two rooms for storage at the ground level of the house. So, after hearing this news, we quickly finished up the tortillas and ran downstairs to see at least a foot and a half of water in the downstairs storage rooms and a few inches leaking up into their apartment. While I was making tortillas thinking wow, it sucks making tortillas in the rain, the other girls, Albin and Osiris were out in the street trying to build a barrier to keep the water from pouring into their property and flooding everything more. When I came down we started frantically moving stuff out of the storage rooms and bailing water out the doors and windows with buckets and bowls as quickly as possible. It must have been quite a sight watching us frantically tossing water out of the rooms and running around moving all of the family’s belongings out.

After bailing out a ton of truly nasty, dirty flood water that we were all completely covered in as lighting flashed all around us and the skies opened up we called it quits for the night and sat down for a lovely dinner of tortillas, beans, rice and fried plantains. You know, the usual.

Despite how little goes on in La Unión there really never is a dull moment.