rain storm

rainy season has officially started here in senegal. we got the first big rainstorm here in yoff on sunday night, the night nikki left. we waited out the storm before moving her luggage up to the road so she could catch a taxi. little did i know that was only the beginning. what we did find out that night is that our rainwater collection system works, since when we checked at 11pm that night, the 500L water tank was completely full! it's good to know that our design and installation worked as planned.

today was another adventure with the rain. francis, ronald (one of our senegalese work partners here at CRESP), and i went to a big market in dakar to look for chicken feathers. we're conducting a test to determine the performance of different types of insulation that can be used in the solar oven. when we got there ronald told us to wait where the taxi dropped us off, so that people wouldn't charge for the feathers since there's toubabs involved. he was gone 25 minutes or so and we started getting worried that he'd come out the wrong entrance and couldn't find us, so francis went off to search. ronald came back and francis eventually made it back. ronald started to take us to see the chicken place and on the way the skies opened up and it started to pour rain. we found a place underneath a building to wait out the storm. it kept raining harder and harder. when i thought it couldn't rain any harder, it did. people were moving all their stuff out of the street (vegetables, fish, etc, that they were selling) and the street quickly turned into a big river. eventually it jumped the curb and the entire place was full of rushing water (about mid-calf deep). a few brave souls waded through the water, while others decided it's the perfect time to get their bags of garbage and dump it into the water. it took more than half an hour after the heavy rain stopped before the water level went down to a point that we could walk through it.

we then took a taxi to another place (after waiting out another round of rain) and the streets were flooded. the taxi we got into didn't have working windshield wipers (and it was still pouring rain at this time) and we could also see holes in the frame of the car, so there was a bit of water coming in. the best part though was when he drove through some pretty deep water and the water started coming in underneath the door! there was 2-3 inches of water deposited onto the floor of the car.

it was a great experience though to see all of it and i'm glad we happened to choose this day to go to the market. of course i hope this isn't typical for rainy season and that we have to go through this every day...