Skip to main content

I get smote by Thor

Image
By
I'm on Skype when the call comes from outside: "Thabo! Pula e tla!" (The rain is coming--Thabo is my Setswana name.) I take a quick break and get my clothes down off the line. Two hours previously the sky had been completely clear, but now there are some moderately threatening clouds rolling in. I go back inside, close my screen door, and unplug my electronics.

At this point I feel sand blowing on my skin, and I realize the wind has come up. It's blowing so hard I can barely get the door closed, and I hear heavy things smashing around outside. During the five seconds the door was open about a half-inch of dirt has collected in my bucket bath. I worry my roof is about to blow off, but then the rain comes, as hard as I have ever felt it. The rain is pouring in unbroken streams to the floor in about six places. I distribute some buckets and pans around to catch some of the mess.

Then: the hail. It is utterly deafening under the tin roof. The hail is bouncing through the hundreds of gaps between the sheets, but at first all I can do is hold my hands over my ears. I notice a new stream of water has started right directly over my computer's keyboard. As I had unplugged it but not shut it down, I jerk the battery and throw it on my bed, about the only place that isn't getting drenched.

Here you can see a barrel that blew against my door and bits of my host family's house.  
The storm probably lasted twenty minutes at most, but it did more damage than any other thus far. My roof was damaged (again), and several were outright torn off throughout the village. Several of the pit toilets at my school were also torn apart:

Not as much privacy as originally advertised.
Luckily, I let my computer dry overnight and today and it seems to be working fine. I'm not sure what to do about this damn roof, but for now I'm going at it with some more caulk.
Labels:

Comments

  1. JessiApril 20, 2010 at 7:03 PM

    Yay! The computer still lives :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanApril 23, 2010 at 1:42 PM

    Yeah, thank goodness. It's not as sprightly as it once was, but the old girl is still tottering along. Not as ancient and decrepit as yours, though!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more