Rainy Day Women

February flew by even more quickly than expected and Lexi left last Saturday, leaving me once again solita in Arequipa. Not surprisingly, things were pretty crazy during her whirlwind tour and less urgent activities like blogging kind of fell by the wayside. This post is well out of date now since the rainy season wrapped up a couple weeks ago, but it was a rather unusual summer weather-wise, so...

Never having come earlier than March in the past, all I knew of the Arequipeñan climate was beautiful and sunny weather every day with chilly desert nights. I had never seen a drop of precipitation and sincerely believed the reports of heavy rains during the summer months were invented for naive gringas. Not so. Just about the time Lexi came, the heaviest rains anyone had seen in years started to hit.

Some afternoons, the rain was so loud on the metal roof of the workshop that we had to give up talking until it subsided. One of these afternoons found a nearly defeated Andrea watching the downpour from the doorway of the workshop.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Ñañas armed themselves with plastic bag ponchos and headed down to check on their homes.

Many of them have makeshift metal roofs that leak large quantities of water, while more solid cement roofs don't drain properly and begin to crumble if they become too saturated. This led to serious problems a few years ago in Alto Cayma, but this year nearly everyone managed to make it through with minimal damage.

The newly paved road up to the church didn't fair so well, however, and those of us that stuck around until the end of the day had to hitch a ride down in the back of the church's food delivery van since the roads were washed out and we'd missed the last of the combis brave enough to venture out.

On the way down, we passed a driver debating whether to try to ford what used to be the road up to the church...

and a pedestrian waiting on a sandy island for safe passage down the hill.

The next day we found a couple of the neighborhood dogs sniffing around the impressive canyons left by runoff from the paved road up to the church and in the following weeks we passed teams of people filling in the gaps with sand. Things are mostly back to normal now as we move out of summer, but we'll see if strange weather starts up again in the coming months...