rain, rain, go away.

It’s 2:30am, but I can’t sleep. Rain is pummeling outside of our windows.

It’s been falling constantly for about six weeks. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t been in a jungle rain–it isn’t like the temperate areas I grew up in. Monsoon season is indescribable, the way it just doesn’t stop for days and weeks on end. And while often it’s just a steady, straight rain, sometimes it is this, what I hear outside my window. It just pounds on the house and concrete and trees. A sheet of water flows off the sides of our roof.

And while we have monsoon season every year, this year has been unprecedented. We’ve been dealing with flooding all around Mae Sot for days now. Entire regions of Burma are flooded, with thousands and thousands of people displaced.

Honestly, for our neighborhood, it hasn’t been the worst this year. While our neighbors houses are low, we are mostly affected by a nearby dam, which fills and fills where it can’t hold the pressure. Due to some political and leadership issues in past years, the dam will fill to capacity and they’ll be forced to open it up so it doesn’t break. This floods our entire area rapidly–sometimes up to six or seven feet in a few hours.

This year, they’ve seemingly done a great job managing the dam, letting a bit out at a time. This year, it’s all come from sky, in unbelievable amounts.

Thida’s house is on a peninsula of sorts made by a river. The bamboo bridge to their house collapsed on Friday, after Thida had gone home to wait out the heavy, heavy rain and go out to the market. It was a holiday, so two of her kids had left to go to an event, and another neighbor boy had come over to play with her son. She called, unsure how to get her two girls home, how to get this little boy back home, and what they’d eat for dinner–she’d be unable to leave to buy rice yet!

While most of their house is surrounded by this river, the last side of land goes up against the gated neighborhood in town. So Friday evening, after deliveries, we gathered her two girls, plus bags of rice and food, and drove to the back of the neighborhood. Thida’s husband and two son-in-laws came to help scale the wall, passing over the little boy and receiving back Thida’s girls and food for the evening.

They were unable to rebuild the bridge until mid-day Sunday, stuck on their little island of sorts! Her son really loves church, though, and there was a special dance they’d learned in Sunday school the week before, for performance this week. Since the water had gone down some, his dad carried him through chest-high water, with his son on his shoulders, so he could cross the river and go to church with us! It’s Father’s Day weekend, by the way, so #superdadwin.

And really, for our neighbors it hasn’t been as bad as for others. Their houses are currently okay, and as dry as they can be. That said, it’s morally draining, and we can see it in their eyes.

They shower and wash clothes outside in the rain day after day. All their clothes have to be “dried” inside, which they never do. They just get put back on damp, often moldy, and worn out into the rain again to just get wetter. The ground is a muddy mess, so most have given up shoes until they get to the road or arrive to school. As you can guess, sickness goes up considerably, with fever after fever and infected cut after infected cut. So many have come with what I have only heard referred to in English as “toe rot”–where their feet are just never able to dry, and in-between your toes grows a fungus.

Even in our house, which is as Western as we could wish in our impoverished neighborhood–everything is damp and humid, including the tile floor and walls. Our clothes won’t dry, either. We bleached all our furniture last weekend, because we had found mold growing on every single shelf in the kitchen, Stephen’s desk, our laundry room shelves, the kids’ benches, the kids’ computer desks, and the ceilings in two rooms. For us, it’s nuisance, yes. I’m tired of being wet; I’m tired of going for bike rides and runs and swims in the rain; I’m tired of driving and even walking through flooded streets to deliver bread and flowers around town while Pyo Pyo & I return just soaked! (I’ve had enough time in the car, driving through floods and delivering in the rain, to sort out a translation for “Rain, Rain, Go Away” that I learned as a child.)

I’m tired of all these things, yes. I’m tired of being wet and chilled. But for our neighbors, it’s so much worse. Isn’t it always that way, with the privilege I carry? Every nuisance to me is a liability for others.

Most of our neighbors are construction workers, and it’s difficult to build concrete houses in the rain. Most have inconsistent work, if any. Even those who work in the fields, now during rice season, spend their days drenched in the rain. While their wives try to figure out how to cook in a tiny hut, dry clothes in a tiny hut, and keep their kids dry and healthy.

And tonight, as I just listen to it pummeling, I listen for the call of our names, afraid water will rise into their homes. I think of so many that are flooded; and I just pray it will stop, that the sun might come out again after so, so many days.