Week VI - Day 2

Rain Rain Rain = FLOOD!

So...this one time, in Juba, the rain started to fall at around 8:45am and didn't stop until after 11am. And when I say rain, I'm not talking sprinkle-spittle, I'm talking buckets, cats & dogs, Noah and the Ark style rain. It rained so much so that our hotel took in enough water and had us wading through ankle-deep in water all the way down both of the first floor hallways.

I nabbed the squiggy that the cleaning crew usually uses and Michael was able to keep the water that had bubble up from the shower drain away from our bed and living space. We worked for over two hours with the power knocked out and the heat beginning to warm us up. I even jumped in to help the hotel staff fill buckets of dirty water and dump them back outside.

Michael moving the waters

At first, we were sitting on the patio, me trying to catch up on some writing with Michael keeping me company. The rain began to fall in a steady pattern and made us feel all cuddly. We thought it would be over within 10-15 minutes. How wrong we were! The rain then began to pour down so heavily that we could not hear ourselves talking. We then had to protect our phones and the computer from the water because the wind began blowing; causing the rain to move in a diagonal manner and spray mist. So we sat under the protection of the second floor where the Chinese party every weekend.

Chinese guy meditating in the rain

The awe we felt soon turned to concern as we realized there was no way back inside the hotel without braving the murky calf-deep waters full of cat poop and possibly human excrement from the streets outside. We watched with disgust as the security wall that separated us from the dirt road on the other side began sending mud and slime through its 6 inch round portal: the same hole that the Ethiopian men used to pump out the sewage from under the very patio where we sat. Michael's stomach churned.

Eventually, we took the walk and made it inside where we felt safe for the time being. Within 15 minutes of our arrival, we began to hear a gurgling noise emanate from the bathroom. At first I thought it was the toilet draining but, upon closer inspection, my heart sank when I saw brackish brown waters coming up through the drain-hole on the shower floor. To be clear, there was no actual shower door nor curtain separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom so, the nasty water was actually filling up the entire bathroom floor and was moving to the rest of the room!

When I opened the door to go tell managing staff what was going on, I was completely shocked to see that our room was not the only room going through such a hellish transition. all twelve rooms on our wing and the other twelve rooms on the opposite wing were experiencing the same thing. And that's when I saw the water seeping...no, streaming in from the walls. All I could do was pray that the rain stopped: so I did. The rain finally stop and that's when the work began.