This was about a month ago now, but has actually been repeated many times since then. We are working on staying dry, finding creative ways to dry laundry and keeping our spirits up. I remember when rainy days had that cosy, melancholy feeling and necessitated listening to entire Weepies albums and watching Meg Ryan movies. Now they are simply days in which you can anticipate spending the entire day with wet pants. Word on the street is that Tansen is floating away this year with an extra long and extra heavy monsoon season. Yeah, I’m going with that.
This is what the steps looked like that morning
Day 1: Dave made it to work before it really started coming down. Our son stayed home from school with an upset tummy and we laid low and watched it coming down outside. It continued to pour all day, a constant rushing noise you could hear particularly loud in out tin roof bathroom. We watched out the window as the stream coming through out yard got fuller and swifter. Things started to float by, a flip-flop, a deflated rubber ball, plastic bags and other trash, in our gate and down the stairs to the neighbors. ‘Wow we thought, it is really raining’. Later in the afternoon our power went out, which is not unusual and we went about our day. We went to bed that evening listening to the constant sound of rain, wind, and thunder as if someone were using a vacuum cleaner and running it into walls all night long.
Day 2: Still coming down, power never came back on, back-up battery is dead. Loaded up on rain gear to walk our son to school. There is so much water it splashes over the tops of his rain boots before we make it out of the yard. There are streams across the usual paths to school and it is hard to tell how deep they are. Nepalis are watching us from the shop doors and house windows. No one else is outside. They laugh at us. One stream through an intersection is so high our son can’t make it across to me on the other side. One of our neighbors stops laughing runs out and carries him across. We are only half way to school. Once we arrive we are both saturated despite our rain gear. He borrows clothes from a school friend and I attempt the walk back home. I can’t remember ever seeing this much rain, I wonder where it is coming from and where it will eventually go. Power is still out and our attic roof has acquired several soggy water stained patches. The bathroom has standing water on the floor. I put some buckets around to try to catch some of the streams.
Day 3: Still no power, still raining. People are starting to talk about what an unusual storm this is. A neighbor with a rain gauge measured 7 inches for the previous day, and it is still raining. There are more soggy water stains on the ceiling. Though still drenched through, we are more prepared for the walk to school and have brought back-up clothes. The ceiling beams in our bathroom become water-logged and the termites decide to move their nest to another part of the house. For several hours a black stream of termites moves little white eggs through our bathroom and into a neighboring wall. We attempt to eat all the fridge food we can and have to throw out the rest. Kids are getting a little stir crazy inside, not sure how much longer I can take it either. I send them out to play in puddles, they come right back in. “That rain is really sharp” says our son. It is raining too hard to play outside.
Day 4: No rain, well a little rain, but the consistent onslaught of water has dissipated to a small drizzle. The sound is weird, you can actually hear drips as opposed to the rush of the storm. The neighbors come out and start to talk about the damage. There are rumors of floods in India and western Nepal. There was a landslide in Butwal and that is why the power is down. The newly planted corn fields in the valley have been sunk. You can see the water still flowing down between the hills to the valley below. The road that takes you out-of-town to Kathmandu, is impassable in parts. The neighbors talk about their theory of the two storms together that have made this massive super storm. They assure me monsoon season isn’t usually like. The final count was 20 inches in 3 days.
Trips Take People 