When it rains, it pours!

I'm loving rainy season! Right now, it rains almost every other day, and when it rains it absolutely pours! My apartment building has a corrugated steel roof (as do 90% of the buildings here), so it gets pretty loud. I was at dinner with a family last week and it started raining so hard we couldn't even talk at the dinner table!

This is what it looks like before it rains. The sky gets all ominous looking and these huge clouds roll across the sky. Last week the sky turned green, kind of like what we get in Texas during tornado weather. (Oh, and the traffic noise in the background is pretty normal! We hear honking and squealing brakes from about 5:30am until after 10pm sometimes. Welcome to living just a few blocks from the main market!)

Then when the rain starts, it makes these tiny drip drip drip sounds on the roof. Give it a minute or two and it starts pouring off the roof like this:

See, my mangoes are STILL green! *shakes angry fist at said mango tree*

View from the front door of my apartment. The other building is a Christian publishing house and Christian bookstore that we share the compound with.

And then it proceeds to rain sometimes for several hours! All of my windows are 4" slats of glass and I usually keep the lever in the "open" position to allow airflow through my apartment, but I've discovered that the wind can drive the rain right through and then I end up with a puddle on the floor. :)

I love the rain, but as we say here, "When the rain comes, NEPA (electricty) goes." Sadly, it's usually true that within 5 minutes of a really good rain starting, the power will go off and stay off for several hours. Thankfully, the cool rainy breeze means that I don't need my ceiling fans, and I can survive with a few lights run by my battery & inverter system. And when it's dark outside, the rain makes for really good sleeping weather!