03 October 2005 - 11:04
This year’s rainy season has been especially good for a lot of the country, but Tidjikja hasn’t received any more rain than usual…until last week. Last Tuesday evening, it started raining, and it didn’t stop for more than a few hours until Thursday afternoon. Wednesday morning, I woke up to the rain still coming down, and I could hear the seasonal river a few hundred meters away – it had filled up in the night. Since the river usually fills up, flows out, and subsides back to a mud puddle within a day, I knew that now was my only chance to go floating – an idea I’ve been joking about since Luke gave me his inflatable pool chair, but that I’ve never had a chance to actually act upon.
So all four of us volunteers headed down to the river, which was flowing higher than I had ever seen it. I waded through knee-deep mud at the bank to get to the water, jumped on the chair, and floated downstream to cheers (and jeers) from the crowds of Mauritanians who had gathered to see the rushing river. The river was so full that I even got to ride some mini rapids! Amanda took a turn, then I went again. I tried to convince some Mauritanians to try it, but only one guy would get on, and I had to hold the chair. So much for a cultural exchange – I was hoping to introduce a few people to the joys of floating on the river, but I forgot that most people here don’t know who to swim (why would they?), so it probably wasn’t a good idea for them to try it anyways.
On Thursday, the rain finally subsided enough to get out of the house for a while. I had to drop several large stones into the small lake that had formed in front of my door in order to have stepping stones to get out of my house, and I went looking around town. Within the span of a few days, Tidjikja had received almost three times the amount of its normal annual rainfall – around 18 cm of rain. For a city that isn’t used to that much rainfall, this caused a lot of problems. The water rushing through the city down into the valley took out walls and parts of houses, especially in the old part of the city, where some street were completely blocked off by fallen walls. The seasonal river filled up over the tops of the cement pylons that are used to measure its depth, filling nearby roads with half a foot of mud, tearing up desert scrub brush and palm trees in its path, collapsing portions of the paved road that didn’t have a strong foundation, and flooding houses and businesses near the river.
Fortunately for me, my house is pretty far back from the river, and not near any of the paths the water rushing down into the valley took on its way to join the main body of water. I did get enough rain in my compound to open up a big sinkhole where one of my soakpits collapsed in, but I was able to seal the hole before any major damage was done. And the small leak in my salon turned into a large leak, which I ended up fixing with a big wad of gum after climbing up to my roof. But I was spared from the damage done to many other houses in the city, some of which are no longer habitable.
The mini-flood knocked out cell phone reception, electricity, and the water system for the whole city. Everything but the water was back up and running by Wednesday afternoon. Water has been restored to parts of the city, but my part of town is still dry. That means no washing clothes, since it takes up too much water. I’ve been using rainwater that I collected as it ran off my roof to wash dishes and my hands, I started using the muddy mini-lake water from my street to flush my toilet, and I've been "bathing" with Wet Wipes (I knew they'd come in handy someday!). Fortunately, I had a bunch of water saved up in bottles before it went out that I’ve been drinking and cooking with. All that ran out yesterday, so I went with a friend to his palmery and took some water pumped from his well half-way across town, back to my house. Hopefully it will last for a while – transporting water that far is not fun work.
