It’s been raining for what feels like forever.
We’re coming up on eight days now of steady, heavy rain. Every once in a while the sky clears for an afternoon, just long enough to make you think it might be over. The ground starts to dry on the surface. The air shifts a little. You start to believe it.
And then the rain comes back.
Schools have been out all week. Kids stay home because there’s no way to get there, and even if they could, the buildings don’t hold up well in this kind of weather. The roads—if you can still call them that—slow everything down first. And then eventually, they just stop everything altogether.
On Monday, during one of those “maybe it’s done” windows, Asher left on a moto to go to PDP to see my mom. What should have been a four-hour ride turned into nine. Mud, water, long stretches where the road disappears into something softer, deeper. The kind of trip where you don’t really have good options—you just keep moving forward because turning around doesn’t solve anything either. He made it, but not without feeling every mile of it.
Now the roads in our area are flooded. Shut down. You can’t get in or out. The edges have started to break away in places, and the middle holds just enough to make you think you might make it… until you don’t. Trucks sit where they got stuck. Motos get pushed through sections that used to be easy. Everything takes longer. Everything costs more.
After the flooding this past January, we were able to add more drains on campus and repair some of the homes that took the worst of it. You can actually see the difference now. The water has somewhere to go. It moves instead of sitting. It’s a quiet kind of progress, but it matters. We’re not standing in the same depth of water we were before, and that’s not a small thing.
But there are parts of this we can’t fix.
Our biggest concern right now is mudslides. When the ground gets this saturated, it doesn’t take much. A shift, a break, and everything above it starts to move. There’s no redirecting it. No holding it back. The staff know that. Some of them have already moved out of their homes for now, choosing to stay somewhere safer until the rain lets up. We’ve seen what it looks like when four feet of mud and rock come through a house. It doesn’t just pass through—it settles in. It changes everything about that space.
Inside our own rooms, we’re feeling it too. There are multiple serious leaks right now—in my classroom, the therapy room, even our bedroom. We’ve got five-gallon buckets set out in different spots, and we’re switching them out two to three times a day just to keep up. You start to recognize the sound of each drip. Which one is picking up. Which one needs to be emptied again. And we’re the ones with a good tin roof. I keep thinking about the homes that don’t have that layer of protection.
Some of the staff have already left because their homes can’t handle this kind of rain. We’ve opened up our spaces for anyone who needs somewhere dry to stay. Mattresses on floors. Corners turned into sleeping areas. It works for now, but there’s only so much room to offer.
There’s a different kind of quiet that settles in during days like this. Not the normal kind. It’s heavier. Like everything is waiting to see what the ground will do next. Waiting to see if the rain will finally stop, or if it’s just going to keep going.
We go outside and check the drains. We look at the hills. We listen at night for anything that sounds like it might be shifting. Small routines that start to matter more when everything feels uncertain.
If we come to mind today, don’t let it pass quickly.
Pause for a minute. Set a reminder if you need to. Step outside, even if your sky is clear, and think of what it feels like when it isn’t.
Pray for dry skies.
