Water, Water Everywhere

Well, we asked for it. Ask you ye shall receive and whatnot. After one of the worst droughts the country has ever seen, our village just had the worst flood that it has ever seen. It all started innocently enough. It was Thanksgiving and Sally and I planned a lovely couple of days in Sauvusavu town with all 20 of the Peace Corps Volunteers on our island, Vanua Levu. (It means “big land,” which would explain the 20 volunteers. Don’t worry, it is way smaller than Rhode Island, I am sure.) So, we rented two houses, made all of the Thanksgiving food that we could create out of local ingredients—sorry, no turkey—and had a great time. Really, it was fun and we managed to have some pretty authentic T-Day food.

On Thursday night, it started raining and I mean RAINING. One can only see rain like this in the tropics. Maybe they have it in the southeast US, but we certainly don’t have it on the west coast. Wow. Rain. Lots of it, like someone just dumped out the sky and the sky was a giant bucket. By morning, town was a lake, which is hard to do because being right on the ocean, you would think that it would make its way to the sea. Somehow by sheer volume, that rain found ways to pool up and make reservoirs. Luckily, we were all staying until Saturday to give this some time to clear up. It didn’t. It rained all day Friday and then all night Friday like that. Seriously, that is one big bucket.

By the time Saturday came it was clear that we wouldn’t be going back to our villages which after a couple of days of fun didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Plus, when you get stuck somewhere like this, then Peace Corps has to pay for it. Thank you taxpayers! We had a lovely time. The rain let up by Sunday and we all started making our way back to our villages. We had heard some stories that our road and our village had been particularly hard-hit, but we had no idea. We got there on Sunday to find that the village was underwater, although it had been really underwater, 5-6 feet deep in some spots. It flooded a whole bunch of houses, flooded the community hall, the dispensary, all of the electrical junction boxes, and washed a few houses away entirely. The coastline moved in about 100 yards. You know everyone makes the joke that once global warming happens, they will have beachfront property and how great that will be? Well, I won’t go blaming this flood (and then erosion) on anything, but now we have it. Where our neighbors house was is now an arm of the sea and a new tidal river 25 feet from our house. Once they finish knocking down the house, we will have a perfect view. Sorry neighbor.

Anyway, we got to the village to find mayhem, a whole lot of standing water still and the water shut off. That was a problem because in all of this, Sally and I managed to get some bug that would have required us to use a lot of water, if you know what I mean. So, back to town we went where we stayed for a couple of more days while the bug went away. We got back home on Tuesday and later that day we got our water back. Today is Wednesday and the electricity is even back on. A landslide took out a section of our water supply but they were able to replace it pretty quickly.

So here we are. It is Wednesday and we are back to normal, sort of. Our house was spared water going inside, but let’s just say that my complaints about children, pigs, and chickens in my garden were misplaced. A flood sets a new standard. I now have a clean slate. Actually it is not clean at all but buried by debris. I will dig through the debris then have a clean slate. I haven’t seen it but I heard that farm outside the village is trashed. It is one thing for me since it is just sort of a hobby, but farming is peoples’ livelihoods and I don’t know what many of them are going to do having lost their second crop in one year (the cyclone finished off the first one last March).

A good chunk of the village is underwater still and we are trying to figure out a way to drain it. I know how to do it but then this guy in the village died, which means everything stops so that we can have the funeral. Once that is over, then we will get to digging channels. I am hoping to put three sumps into the ground in the lowest parts of the village, connecting them with pipe and then draining it to the river. It won’t stop a flood but it will drain the village after it. Of course, after a day of sunshine, we just had another heavy rain and while the river doesn’t look like it will flood again, the new rain just keeps filling up the village like a bathtub. I am remembering the drought fondly.

So, there you have it. It’s funny—I found myself working on farming because that was where the need was. So, that is where I put all of my energy. Just like that, my job has changed completely. My farming days are over. I am now a flood engineer and an erosion expert. Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Sorry I don’t have any photos of this. Somehow documentation didn’t seem that important at the time.