May 22

So the rains were a little late coming to the north part of the country. My last entry, I wrote about our happiness of the first rain of the year. Well…… that was in Phnom Penh about a 3 weeks ago. Our meetings in Phnom Penh were at the end of April, and until yesterday, (may 21) it was that we finally received a formidable shower. And MAN has it been hot. Just hot. – Hot as in, you have a wet rag on ya, with the fan on high in order to fall asleep – and then at around 1am, you get up to bathe again just to cool down. You literally didn’t feel like doing anything all day. Just miserable. Hot.

But the last three nights we’ve gotten some cooler air by around 9pm; and then yesterday during the 3rd hour of classes in the afternoon…the sky finally broke. We were so elated and grateful. It was amazing. Prior to that rain, we were starting to get just a little concerned, because our family’s well was starting to get really low. We’d only be able to pump water for about two minutes (yes, I know, we have do have the luxury of an electric pump) ….. but we’d pump for 2 minutes, have to wait an hour for the water to fill back up and then pump again to fill up our tank, and really we could only fill it about 1/3 full. Needless to say we were in water conservation mode; which is not so fun when it’s so hot, because 1) you want to drink lots of it 2) you want to bathe more often due to the extra sweating your doing. But thankfully, we finally got some rains. Our laundry tank is now full once again (with fresh rain water, yay!), as well as a few other water holding tanks in the yard. Hopefully the next few days will continue to bring more rain so the water table can once again get saturated enough for us not to feel guilty about filling up our water tank. Global warming? Who knows. (Insert soap-box plug to do what you need to do to be just a little bit greener…… hang your clothes on the line instead of drying them by machine, walk or ride your bike to your destination and get a little exercise and save gas, turn your thermostat a degree lower if the heater’s runnin, and a degree higher if the AC’s working. You know. Stuff like that.)

Anyway, the rains came up north, and we are VERY happy and feel like we can function again…