I awoke in the early hours of the day to torrential rain. The type that makes you want to roll over and go back to sleep or to pick up a book and get lost in the adventures of another, whether they are real or fictitious. That was not what I did. By the time breakfast rolled around, thunder and lightening were on the menu. I had hoped that by the time we needed to leave the house at 8:30 am, the storm would be gone and that the rain at least would have let up. I got one wish, no storm. The rain continued. We, Sr Sally, Sr Cathy and I, held our bags close, popped up our umbrellas and set off. Before, we were at the end of the street, my umbrella was practically on top of my head to try and stop the water soaking me through, the front of my shorts were wet and it didn’t look like my shoes were going to stay dry long.
It is between a five to ten minute walk to the main road where we usually hail a tricycle for our ride to the Centre. Sometimes, someone is being dropped off in the subdivision, so, we are sometimes able to get a tricycle before we get to the main road. No such luck today!
I confess, my mood matched the weather. I was grumpy, partly due to the weather and partly because I hadn’t slept well. We approached a section of the road that is covered with water on a day without torrential rain. Normally, there is a path along the footpath that isn’t actually used as a footpath. (The road is actually more serviceable), Today, it was a puddle, just like the street. Dry shoes became semi-wet shoes. I was still grumpy.
There is nothing anyone can do about the weather and I knew that. There was another puddle across the road and this time no footpath at all. I turned around looked at Sr Cathy and playfully stomped my way right through the centre, laughing hysterically as I did. Semi-wet shoes now saturated shoes. My grumps were gone.
We walked on, shelter in sight and hopefully a tricycle not too far away. We arrived at the subdivision entrance, where the guard sits. There is a shelter there, but it really isn’t all that big. Certainly not big enough for the three of us, the two people already there and the guard.. I stood outside the shelter with the underside of the umbrella pulling random strands of hair, it was that close to my head. The guard laughed at the size of my umbrella. I’m pleased he got a laugh today. It seems everyone else was more worried about my wet shoes than I was. They would (and will) eventually dry.
As we stood waiting for a tricycle and trying to communicate with another Sister who lives nearby, the rain continued to fall. As it did, the water level on the main road continued to rise. The gutters here cannot take this amount of rain, in part due to the litter that is in the drains and partly because well they just can’t take that much rain. I was conscious that unless there was a tricycle on our side of the road who was willing to stop for us and then turn around, we needed to cross the road and the puddle kept getting bigger and bigger. In the end, we didn’t need a tricycle, because the other Sister we were meeting ended up getting a ride in a car and on their way past they saw us, so they stopped. You guessed it… on the other side of the street! So we walked up the street a little further, where the puddle wasn’t quite so big and the water was ‘clean’ and we crossed, in true Philippine style with traffic coming in both directions, a hand was held up to get us safely to the other side. In the car, six people sat in the five seats!
It was only 9 am.
So Now From Here 