Too Much of a Good Thing

Although much of Guatemala still awaits the coming of the rainy season, which should have began months ago, my area of the country has begun it's rainy season in earnest. My last entry detailed the day that the rains finally began to pound the soils of the altiplano of Guatemala, and since that day we've had a fairly sufficient amount of rain. Last week as a friend and I packed for a short vacation to the Mayan ruins in Tikal, my town was hit with the far reaching fingers of a hurricane that passed though Southern Mexico.

Some neighbor kids were visiting me, playing on my porch, when we noticed the ominous black clouds rolling in from the mountains to the south of us. I hurried them off to their houses, not wanting them to get caught in the rain, and as soon as their feet had crossed the threshold the skies ripped open with lightening, thunder, and more rain that I've ever seen in my whole life. The missing pane of glass in one of my windows that had never concerned me before suddenly became the cause of a 2 inch flood of water covering the floor of my room. In the flurry of pushing all of my possessions to the one dry corner of my room, my friend and I failed to notice that the corrugated plastic roof covering the middle of the house was blown off by the wind, leaving 6 feet square open to the driving rain. By the time we noticed the impromptu skylight, several inches of water had poured into the rest of the house. Though the rains eventually abated, we spent the rest of the afternoon sopping, sweeping, and mopping up what must have been close to 40 gallons of water. Here's some photos of the whole shebang...