Just Another Rainy Day in the Desert

In addition to all the fun and festivities of Jason's birthday, we also had a very unusual occurence--RAIN! When we went to pick up the kids yesterday afternoon, we could tell it was clouding up, so we asked the taxi driver if he thought it was going to rain. He assured us it was still too hot for rain (average rainfall through the summer months here is NONE). Well, not 30 minutes later, we started hearing the pitter-patter of raindrops outside, and sure enough, it was raining!

It only sprinkled for a few minutes then, so when we went out to eat a few hours later, we decided to sit outside. The weather was beautiful, but the whole meal I (Beth) could see lightning off in the distance over Jason's shoulder. At one point, Lee Anna saw it and said, "Mom, the light came on in the sky over there!"

We came home and went to bed without any more rain, but around 2 a.m. we woke up to the sound of more pitter-pattering and even thunder! Then, we woke up again to the sound of Lee Anna crying. Apparently it's a good thing that it doesn't rain very often here, because the rain falls very loudly on the wall-unit air conditioner outside the kids' room. Lee Anna couldn't sleep because of all the rain noise. Finally, after a few futile attempts to get her back to sleep, we brought her to our room and she spent the rest of the night on a pallet on our floor.

This morning, we woke up to find this on our lovely back porch:
This is all dirt that the rain washed off of the trees. The trees look nice and green and fresh now, but the ground is a big muddy mess.

Rain here is a big inconvenience. There's no drainage system in the roads, so it doesn't take much rain at all to create big mud puddles everywhere. Most taxis don't have working windshield wipers, so the driving can be even more dangerous than usual. A lot of nationals will just choose to stay inside rather than have to deal with the mud and mess. Lee Anna's class was supposed to go on a field trip today, but they cancelled it because of the weather (not because it was currently raining, because it had rained the night before!). I talked to a friend of ours this morning who's only been living here about 10 months. We were talking about the rain and I told him we were thinking about keeping our kids home because of it. I'm sure he was thinking, "What? Because it rained a little?"

We might be in trouble if we ever move back to Florida!