raining. inside.

we were surprised by the first rains this year.  early. hard. and everywhere.

when we stored all of the books and materials that make up entreamigos we

felt really lucky to have the giant freezer room in the bodega to do so.  It was enclosed, insulated with a concrete roof and the regular bodega roof above that.  i didn’t expect to think much about our stuff until it was time to pull it all  out and set up for the new entreamigos.  wow. i was sure wrong.

in the first rain, i went to check on the stuff.  almost more by chance than on purpose as we hadn’t started construction yet and i didn’t have much of a reason to be there.  i entered in the storage room without turning on the light but even then i knew that something was wrong.  the air was humid, heavy, saturated.  the smell of mold was overpowering and my sandals sloppy wet from the pools of water on the floor.

water had come in. and not a little bit.  it appeared to have rained directly on

the computers. everything was soaked. at that moment i was more surprised than anything else. i called chris parsons, our standby saviour and he rescued the computers by removing them to his house/dry room in lo de marcos.  Dana and I attempted to rescue the books, and re-boxed many that we had salvaged.   we lost many books but many of those were the overflow of english beach novels… not that we want to lose those but it wasn’t as painful as what was to come.

we hired some albaniles and bought several tarps and set up what we thought was a foolproof, watertight system to protect the roof of the storage room.  again (for some reason), i thought we had it all figured out.

and then it rained again. really rained. 4 inches in the course of a few hours.
by the time i arrived at the bodega, the damage had been done.
the water entered, pooled on the floor and was sucked up by the cardboard.
everything was swollen with the humidity. books, materials, art supplies were all black with mold.  it had probably been a process of a few weeks that all came to a climax at that moment.

it was a breakdown moment. overwhelming.  heart wringing. again, we lost many books, some of those important books that we had worked hard to receive, some of those books that had come from my personal collection from my own childhood. in those first few weeks of rains we lost about 30% of our library books and paper based art supplies.

the good news amongst the bad is that the majority of our hard earned spanish children’s collection was not affected as they had been boxed in plastic bins.  we lost mostly english children’s books and beach novels which we find easier to replace.

i am trying to understand it as a cleansing.  a right of passage. a moment of hardship on the path to a brighter future…   something like that.