Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Monsoon nor Flood...

I’ve been trying to find the time for three weeks to write an update about my work in vegetable packaging and transport. I hope to have it ready next week. In the meantime, I wrote this one back on June 23...

---

The streets are flooded and I’m sitting at my desk drinking from a small bottle of Québec maple syrup. Life is surreal sometimes. In this case that surrealism is due to just how small our world has become and just what a difference a proper drainage system can make to public roadways.

My family sent me a care package three and a half weeks ago. It arrived today. I think the most difficult leg of its journey was the last few kilometers after the post office. I was wobbling down the street on my warped back wheel, the giant parcel from home wedged lopsidedly in the basket in front of my misaligned handlebars, when the skies began to darken. Something was in the air. I could feel a big downpour was on its way. I altered my plans, quickened my pace and started heading for home rather than the office.

A bike repair man called out to me from the side of the road, pointing at my misaligned rear wheel. Since suffering a minor hit and run at the hands of a reckless motorcyclist on Sunday, after friendly bystanders, moto drivers, and passing children, he was the umpteenth person to call attention to the problem. “Luckily, this guy might just be able to help,” I thought. “Can do?” I asked. He pointed to his pump. “I’m a bicycle repair guy, aren’t I?” seemed to be the implication.

I pulled over and watched him set to work. He deflated my rear wheel and re-inflated it. The skies continued to darken and I was running out of time to get home. He seemed satisfied. I didn’t have the patience to try to explain through gestures and monosyllables that I had already given the bike a small once over myself and the problem was that the metal frame of the wheel was warped, not that the tire was deflated. Instead, I smiled, pointed to the handlebars and said, “Not straight.” He fixed them right up, a service for which I paid about twelve cents.

By now it was too late. The rain began to fall. With a sense of fatalism, I pulled out my rain coat shaped plastic bag, draped it over the package, slipped my cell phone into a small Ziploc bag, and continued on my way, defenseless against the what was coming.

The rainy season began over six weeks ago. With this downpour though, you could tell the monsoon had finally arrived. Five minutes after the first drizzle began, I was soaked in a way I had thought until then could only be caused by jumping fully-clothed into a lake. The sides of the road began to cover in water. By the end of ten minutes, half the road’s surface was under water and a quarter of my bike wheel was submerged. Water sprayed in all directions as I ploughed on blithely ahead through newly-forming ponds and streams.

The Flood Begins

The streets were a riot of children playing in pond-sized puddles, splashing, rolling old tires, and kicking balls, while the adults huddled under the roof of a nearby gas station. As I pulled onto my own street I noticed that the people living in the shack on the corner had already begun fixing funnels and plastic tubes to the gutters on their roof. Small waterfalls were cascading down from as high as three stories, plunging out of PVC piping eaves troughs, off of tin roofs, and into buckets along the street. As I biked to my home, everyone around me, dry and soaking wet alike, was smiling and laughing. I began to notice for the first time how many of my neighbours had water collection tanks as people scrambled to open plastic valves, and replace full buckets with empty ones under funnels, pipes, and random jets of water. Rainwater here is safer than tap water, cheaper than bottled water, and less effort than boiling water. I became acutely aware of how despite massive marketing and sales efforts in the provinces, not a block away from IDE headquarters in Phnom Penh, I was probably the only one to own a water filter. I resolved to bring this up later with the folks at the office. In the meantime, some of the children were washing themselves under the falls. I brought my bike, package, and cell phone upstairs onto my porch where it was safe before rushing down to join them.

After showering under a three story waterfall, I wandered back into my home to dry off, laughing and trying along the way to explain to Srey Put, the little girl next door, that we never have rain this strong in Canada. By the time I finished changing, I was already ten minutes late returning to work. It was package opening time.

My family, in a display that had put love well ahead of a sense of proportion, had sent me the book for which I’d asked, nine small bottles of pure maple syrup, dozens of vector cereal bars, piles of candy, organic grain bars, M&M’s, and even a bag of soy-jerky. It was everything a hungry young vegetarian intellectual could ask for in faraway Cambodia.

Within thirty minutes the rain had stopped. I left my clothes on the line to dry, picked up a bottle of maple syrup on impulse, grabbed the book to read for later, and jumped onto my bike. The rain was gone but the road was now eclipsed by puddles half the height of my wheels. I arrived at work tired but refreshed, sat down at my desk, maple syrup in hand, and toasted my introduction to the monsoon.