Aguacero

Yesterday I woke up and it was raining fairly hard. I walked to school and it was raining lightly. After periods 2-5 of no rain, it begain to seriously pour.

If I were in a school in the states, I might have stepped in a puddle on the way into the multi-story building or I may have seen the rain outside my window, but it wouldn't really have affect my day.

Here, however, the weather dictates which school activities can occur. The roofs on all the one-story classroom buildings are tin or ceramic tile, so when it pours it is virtually impossible to hear anything else. All the p.e. classes are outside, so the students just huddle under an awning and talk about physical fitness. Because walking from one class to the next involves going outside and wading through the numerous puddles and streams that have developed, students arrive wet, cold, and unfocused. Not that it matters, because they can't hear you or each other anyways so they just do bookwork. All the extracurricular sports are cancelled. And no one can wait to get home to crawl into bed to watch a movie with a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.

Except my room is also tin-roofed, so I can't hear the t.v.! So a book it was, and a welcome reason to lie in bed and relax.

How have we in the states made it so easy to be independent of weather and nature, and why do we act so inconvenienced when it does manage to change our lifestyle a bit? Why not embrace it as a much-needed change of pace and an opportunity to do something we would otherwise not make time for?