The Rivers Run

We are in the middle of the rainy season. Most days clouds build up overhead. Some days it rains… others the humidity just sits in the air like a steam bath. It is hard to even blink without sweating. When the rains fall, they sweep the air momentarily of dust, they send water pooling and running down the rocky streets, they fill up the gutters, slap the leaves of the palms and invite the birds back into the trees. I have to say usually, in a selfish way, I look forward to the rain. The air cools a bit, the mornings are more clear, the colors more vibrant. But I have a lucky perch on a 3rd story apartment. Such is not the experience for most people on the island.

Today we took a group of pastors visiting CONASPEH from Indianapolis on a small trip north along the national highway. Along the route, we passed the little villages that line the route, the markets, the donkeys with their loads and the farmers in the fields. We talked about the change in the vegetation that leaves cacti where tropical forests used to be. We noted the plantain fields, the beautiful coastline and the treeless yet grand mountains rising above us. We also passed numerous dry river beds. The river beds are filled with rocks that have washed down from their previous mountainous perch as a result of erosion. Instead of lush vegetation holding the waters into the soil, the landscape is swept baren by water traversing over rock, and the rock is all that remains in the beds. I’ve become accustomed to seeing these rocky river landscapes. Sometimes a little trickle or a calm small stream will saunter through, weaving around the white stacks of pebbles and sand that fill the river bed. Often you see children standing in the water bathing, women washing clothes, men wiping down their trucks and tap-taps or others gathering water and porting it on their heads back to their home.

On our return trip to Port au Prince this evening, the landscape had changed in the few hours since we left it. The clouds overhead had long warned of rains building. Although we drove back in a light sprinkle, evidence of heavier rains somewhere in higher elevation greeted us as we traversed the once dry riverbeds. We knew to look because a crowd from each village gathered around the bridges and banks of the river watching muddy rapids roar down the rocky bed, filling the bed bank to bank, threatening to surge over the edge, coming dangerously close to the bridge we were driving across. The difference was incredible. One area of the road was flooded with a foot of water, and the galloper had to inch itself through the raging current.

I was amazed at this sudden change, this flash-flood of sorts that came from rains falling in a distant place, but had the potential to ravage the tiny villages lining the river beds. And this was just an ordinary summer rain.

Puts hurricane season into perspective. Not hard to imagine how such devastation occurred from the storms. These villages line the coast, hug the river bed, and walk a tight balance between dry land and flash floods when the rains bring water coursing over eroded hills through dry valleys on its path to the sea.

Go hug a tree.