Sitting in our favourite garden cafe at the weekend (the one with mist sprays all around to make the heat bearable and give the temporary impression of being in a tropical greenhouse every 3 minutes), we realised the music being played in the background was “Singin’ in the rain.” Seemed a strange choice for a country which sees so little precipitation, although if you position yourself carefully on a fairly cool day, the mist can feel very slightly like English drizzle (woooonderful!!).
The rains that fell in August and the first days of September are already fading in our memories, although the potholes that appeared here and there in the tarmac while roads were flooded are a reminder. The unpaved roads were worse affected, obviously, becoming mudslides and traps for unwary non-4×4 vehicles, best avoided. But they have been easy to level off again and are as smooth as stony, unsurfaced roads can be expected to be. (Avoid areas outside rich people’s houses, where they wash their cars and their driveways daily and the run-off creates deep runnels in the dirt road outside.)
The nursery that G attends faces is on a square: a large area of dirt with houses all around. The rains turned it into a muddy swamp, and we parents had to crawl in our cars through the edge of the puddle as we had no idea how deep it would be in the middle. On the road leading into the square, we had to drive through a puddle because it was all the way across the road and there was no better way into the square – then you just have to wait and watch someone else in a similar car try it first! Generally there’s someone around who already knows the best route through it. My car started behaving strangely one day (probably water splashing up into something), so while it was being looked at I had a pick-up truck for a couple of days. I was a less worried driver on those days!
Once the rains stopped (and we’re talking probably six downpours in this rainy season, each lasting a few hours – but usually they only expect four, so it was a wet summer!), the puddles receded steadily. The huge one outside the nursery lasted the longest, and as it shrank, it burst into life – green, slimey life to begin with and then grasses and insects and birds. Now it’s dried out and it’s just a very uneven patch of ground, with no sign of the activity of two weeks ago.
We had a similar experience on a smaller scale with a little puddle outside our back gate, which seemed from a distance to be shimmering. When we looked more closely, we saw it was absolutely full of fat, wriggling tadpoles. Daddy and the girls put some into a couple of jamjars so that we could watch them (E had been learning about the life cycle of a frog just that week!), at which point we realised that none of us knew what tadpoles ate. How on earth had they survived in that puddle? “Your teacher will know,” I said confidently to E, and we proudly took in the ones that had made it through the night to school the next day. I’m not sure her teacher (who is also M’s sister) was best pleased with this sudden responsibility, but she is a very good primary teacher and having tried weakly to pass them back to us to look after, took them on bravely. I haven’t actually heard much about them since. I wonder what happened to them?
