April showers, except it's October

The arrival of the rains has been glorious. My dusty existence (I kinda enjoyed picturing myself as Pigpen from Peanuts) has been replaced by a muddy existence. I would call it the lesser evil of the two.

My favorite thing has been catching rainwater from my roof in my buckets. I mostly use it for laundry (I have no idea what kind of organisms are on my roof, so I figure it's best to use it when it's mixed with lots of soap). I have harvested enough that I've been able to rinse my laundry after soaking it (for most of the past six months, I just kinda lived with the fact that after my clothes dried, there was still a bit of detergent on them). The community taps are running again, so water is available for cooking and drinking (it was available before, just had to be severely rationed). Most importantly, things are turning much greener in the area and some of the seedlings at the school are looking healthy again (and the ones that aren't looking healthy provided a valuable lesson about trees that are not hardy enough for the area).

Apparently El Nino is making it a bit more intense than usual. A lot of people in the village have dug terraces, which is very practical with all the rain this year. Unfortunately, several of them didn't actually plant anything after the intense labor required to dig them Those who did plant mostly planted corn. Apparently my conversations about multi-cropping (raising more than one crop), intercropping (raising crops together, especially ones with a symbiotic relationship) or alternative crops didn't sink very deep. Hopefully the corn will produce a harvest this year, although it hasn't for the past few years.