Well, It's Africa...: Fierce Finishes to the Rainy Season

African skies always love to pretend that nothing happened. When we awoke Friday morning, birds chirped and a bright blue diadem with puffy white clouds shined overhead. One would never guess that the night before we went through a storm I can only liken to my experience living through 2011's Hurricane Irene. Though this storm was rather quick, the clean-up will be anything but. Six days later, the sounds of chainsaws buzzing through the neighborhood are still going strong and our electrical wires still hang in mangled messes throughout the neighborhood. Sigh. We are told it could be a few weeks before our power and internet are restored. In the meantime, I will apparently be spending a lot of time at Kurt's generator-powered school.

Our neighborhood received the brunt of the storm, with downed trees blocking roads on nearly every block. WHAT a mess; we spent the day searching out petrol and groceries before watching a chainsawer spend eight hours massacre-ing 15 of our trees. Meanwhile, most people were just thankful that no one anywhere seemed to have been hurt. As we celebrate close calls and a plethora of firewood literally fallen from the sky, here are some pics of our/ our neighborhood's new challenges:

Here is one of three sections of roof we are now searching for.

Anyone seen the top of our chimney?

Despite anti-burning laws in the city, from the looks of our (not even close to finished) twelve foot high pile, my guess is the neighborhood may be smokey for quite a while.

I found it surprising to find oodles of tall pine trees upon moving to Africa. The problem with them here is that their roots and the soil make for a deadly combination. These toppling giants are hazards found all throughout our neighborhoods.

We were unable to get out of our close (culd-a-sac) because of a downed tree. After learning that the neighbor whose tree it was could not pay for the removal, us (albeit trapped) neighbors all pitched together to get the bill taken care of.

Gotta find humor in the fact that the underground internet cable (above, yellow) just connected last week was pulled up by the only tree that fell on the close.