Since everyone else is writing about it....

i guess i will conform to everyone else and write about the rain. Honestly it is a pretty interesting topic for Trujillo, Peru. Trujillo is a desert..... yes, a desert..... normal thing i think about when i think about trujillo: sand, hot, hot, doesn't rain, hot.... just to name a few. But lately we've been struck by "El nino" (YES, it is real). Last week it rained off and on for about three days, resulting in the loss of electricity on night and our neighbors being stuck on the elevator at 11:30 p.m. (thankfully our brilliant vigilantes rescued them.... that is, after we told them someone was stuck on the elevator). Anyways, that rain was unexpected strange and a little troublesome.... but it was NOTHING compared to the rainfall we received wednesday night.... it began to rain around 1 am and just never let up. Thursday morning i was ever so nicely awakened by my roommate, asking me to come help her with some water leakage..... on boy..... what did i find??? the top floor of our apartment with inches of standing water and water pouring in from the ceiling, light fixtures, doors, windows, walls..... water was coming from everywhere. we worked for two hours straight using every remedy we could think of. We emptied 2 gallon buckets every 5 minutes (as they refilled that quickly), we mopped, sqeegied, swept, etc . etc, etc..... any way to remove water we did it. after two hours we didn't have a dry towel in the house and the rain finally let up a little and by 11 am it totally stopped, but the damage was already done. there were puddles of standing water on our roof that couldn't be swept off and it was just soaking into the concrete and soaking into our house. The afternoon was spent in patching up the roof the best we could (since we were anticipating more rain!) Our remedy for the roof included 75 feet of plastic and a lot of duct tape.... we'll see how that hold up when the rains come. It definitely was a stressful day.... but honestly we were lucky. Many of the houses in trujillo are made from adobe brick.... and they are just fallling down, and there is nothing you can do about it... you just have to wait it out, wait for it to dry. Houses are falling, streets are flooded, and roads are destroyed. To trujillo, Peru... a city in the desert that never planned for rain... a normal rain shower has turned into a natural disaster. Some of the damage i have seen in the newspapers really is heartbreaking.... yes, we did suffer a lot of damage in our house but we didn't lose our house. After all the work i put into yesterday and all the damage I still have so much to be thankful for.