Rain, Rain, Go Away

Well, we had 6 days of good weather with only one night of rain, but last night it started to pour again. It hasn't stopped since...well a few minutes here and there. Someone at church told me they don't remember there ever being this much rain. The paper from June 23rd gave numbers for the average in June in Recife as 388.9mm. On June 23rd 476.9 mm had accumulated already. I am sure that the number has far surpassed that today if Recife is anything like here. When we drove to church this morning water was pouring out of the manholes on the street and there were rivers of water all down the road. We hate to think of how Barreiros and the other cities further north are faring. Here at our house we are getting really good at squeegiing (is that a word?) the upstairs to prevent the rain from pouring into our living room and we have towels at all the windows and the door on the ocean side, which is where the wind is coming from. We also have had two further incidents of no water in our reservoir. All the houses here have reservoirs on top of the house that the city fills. The water is gravity fed into the showers and faucets. No pressure in the showers here! Bel tells us that we run out of water because our house is three stories, so the water to the city fills up all the lower reservoirs first before pumping up to ours. She also advises us to turn off the water the second we are not using it and also take quick showers. The two days we've run out have been days that she works, and then a lot of water gets used to clean floors and bathrooms, etc. By the next morning we have water again, presumably because people don't use a lot of water at night so their holding tanks are full.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful Sunday!

Love the Raaps