More rain

It rained again last night. Today we went out to the camp for a meeting and found the entire thing flooded. We needed to walk a few blocks and I was ok with that. It's just mud, right? I mean, this is their life, they walk through this junk every day. Just because I'm white and not a refugee does not make me any better than anyone else and I can experience this part of life just like they do. At least that's what I thought until we got to the corner of this street that was totally flooded. People were walking through it knee deep, well some people (see pic below) and just as I was about to turn the corner this lady came up and stopped me. In perfect English, which was very surprising, she basically refused to let me walk through it. Said that I would get diseases (which is probably true) and that she was NOT going to allow me to do that.

After the random lady's speech forbidding me to walk in the water, I remembered that it kind of stinks being sick and I've done enough of that lately. I don't know that I could handle throwing some weird African skin disease into the mix. Needless to say I changed my mind and the lady called this kid to go and get a donkey cart, so the kid walked through knee deep water to the market and brought back a donkey cart....now that I'm thinking about it, he didn't even ask for money. That was really nice!

For those of you who have never experienced a donkey cart, well, it's an experience to say the least. This was my first time and I made the mistake of telling my friend that. She proceeded to announce to everyone we passed that it was the white girl's first time on donkey cart...Guess I provided the entertainment for the morning.

But it was an adventure to say the least. My feet and pants were covered in mud but I was expecting that so I wore old clothes and my chacos...I sprayed off the chacos with the hose when I got home and tried to disinfect my feet as well as I could but, even though I didn't actually walk through the water, I still wouldn't be surprised if I got some weird African disease...oh well.

Despite my adventure, my heart really goes out to the people who are living out in these camps. They live in mud houses and when it rains their houses fall down. There is no public transportation because the roads are so muddy nothing can get through and they are left to track through mud until it dries. There were quite a few people trying to use the mud from the street to rebuild their mud walls. Everyone else was using buckets to scoop up the water out of their houses.