Apparently getting nearly 1/3 of the total year's rainfall in 10 hours is a bad thing . . . Ouaga got way to much rain the other day and we had some flooding issues.   Five people have been reported dead and 150,000 have lost their homes.  There are two main roads near my house, one to the north the other to the south.  The one to the north got washed out in certain areas less than a mile from our house.  The main/national/only hospital was flooded and they had to evacuate patients from the some of the wards.

All this took place roughly a mile from our house near the lake.  No damage here at the house however, lucky us.  One power supply station was flooded so there have been extra supply problems with electricity.  We really only lost power for the day of the storm and part of the next day.  Water pressure returned yesterday.  The storm was on Tuesday/Wednesday.  We have been dodging rain since then, just kind of waiting for more problems I guess.  I'm pretty sure the storm that hit us will soon turn into Hurricane Fred and if it doesn't then the east coast of the United States should consider itself lucky as well.

In other news the bank is almost as much fun as the market.  We have a "repose" I believe is the word we have been using here.  That is a three-hour naptime from about 12-3. So at the bank come 2:30 there's a long line of people waiting to get in.  Oh, and the main bank we normally go to got flooded so all their customers were re-routed to the smaller bank around the corner, yay.  If you happen to leave more than four inches of space between you and the person in front of you in line, you will be immediately corrected by the 30 people behind you for not moving forward.  I rather liked this bank however, because I was not greeted at the front door by an AK-47.  I'll take the crowd over the gun.

Ben Roberts
Teacher, English Language Institute, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso