So far the rainy season has been pretty good to me...I've only had to pull half the daily amount of water from the well, my garden gets watered for free, The temperature retreats into the 80s...but last week mother nature took it a bit too far. In one night we got enough rain to completely fill up my 16 liter bucket and completely demolish 7 huts in my compound. As a result of bone rattling thunder and large amounts of sand being washed away from beneath it, my hut now has a large crack running from the bottom to the top of the left hand wall and extending horizontally all the way around the back wall to the other door. I also have a big fissure splitting my cement bed in half from floor to wall. Several of our huts collapsed with little or no visible signs of damage, but when I asked my dad if my hut was going to fall down he told me it would be fine. He also told me to sleep on my cot on the other side of the hut just in case.
Until the rains stop in late October/ early November we can't start construction on new huts or work to repair the crack in mine. Since the largest of our collapsed huts is threatening to fall on the two huts closest to it, those are currently out of commission as well. We've got approximately 40 people in my compound crammed into 6 small huts, which is my motivation for staying in my room despite it's current architectural flaws. The village mason assured me that when a hut collapses the walls always fall outward, so as long as I sleep on the side farthest from the damage I should be safe.
Considering my hut is less than 5 months old it should have withstood the rains better than it did. All of the other huts that fell were over 3 years old. Turns out there were a lot of corners cut during my hut construction, using mostly mud bricks and only a paper thin layer of cement on the walls...which explains why my walls kept crumbling away with every little bump. I have a feeling a lot of the money Peace Corps gave my village to build my hut went into someone else's pocket. So now I have to front the money to get my hut repaired out of my own pocket, when a single bag of cement is going to cost me an entire day's salary. Corruption is such a way of life here though that skimming a little bit off the top of any project/community donation is practically expected, and no one even tries that hard to hide it. Take home lesson: I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on the finances for all of my projects.
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| Collateral Damage |
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| The mud walls cracked right along the seams of the bricks |
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| Horizontal branch of the crack on the left wall |
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| The rest of the crack extending along the back wall |
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