Our First Monsoon Experience

I do realize that by official weather terms the Caribbean does not experience monsoons. Monsoon seasons occur primarily in Asia. But oh my gosh, I have no other way of describing what we experienced this week. We didn't have a thunderstorm and we didn't have heavy rains. We had a loud, flash flood, take cover, trees blowing over, monsoon. Although it rained every day this week, Monday and Thursday were the two big ones. August was unusually dry so now I'm beginning to understand what they mean when they say we're in the rainy season.

Monday evening began with a long, heavy rain storm that lasted for hours. We discovered three leaks in our house we didn't know existed! Our bathroom window gushed water like it was open. I think the water was pouring off the roof so fast that it was collecting at the windowsill and just forcing its way in. I called Ms. Moore (the landlord/mom of the family that lives above us) just to let her know what was going on and she came down to see it for herself. She gave me extra sheets and towels to soak up the water from the window and I asked her if she thought it would go on like that through the night. Her eyes got big and she said to me in complete seriousness, "This is a depression from the hurricane north of here; this could go steady for days!" My horrified response was to laugh. Luckily, it didn't go on for days. This time.

The window leak makes sense, but the wall that runs water baffles me a little. Our place is concrete. There is no gap between the wall and ceiling; water just flows in through that seam! But no worries. We've had no major damage- just a lot of wet towels and some bubbled paint that has already returned to normal.

One funny story is that a friend of mine, another SO, was out with her husband when they got caught in the storm. They were running for cover through the flooding street and she couldn't tell where the sidewalk was. She ran right into a very deep ditch beside the road and literally went under water (and she's a tall girl)! She wasn't hurt, but they were mad they lost their takeout. She said they laughed and so did a couple onlookers.

Thursday evening was a little different, however. It didn't look terribly stormy until all the sudden I turned to Jade and said, "Is that RAIN outside?!" We both quickly moved to different windows to discover that it was full blown monsooning outside! I'll let the video speak for itself. It appears the video quality gets worse when you make it full screen so you may want to just watch it in its small size.

I maintain that it was raining even harder than the video made it seem. Water pooled so quickly! The storm was short lived, but very, very strong. So strong in fact that it brought down three trees in our backyard and part of the fence! I'm bummed to have lost our free supply of bananas, but thankful we didn't have bananas come through our bedroom window that night.

Luckily it didn't fall on the dog house; she was in there!