Shoo Rain

This is the first time I've ever been afraid of rain.

I'm going - no, driving - to Navotas after lunch today to bring three volunteer ALITAPTAP story-tellers to our host school for this tour, Daanghari Elementary School. Socorro Ramos' executive secretary and my officemate, Jac, keeps telling me horror stories about Navotas: the water rises to knee level even when it's just high tide, she warns, what more when it's raining?

And it is raining, raining like a sonofabitch, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.

I like rain: I've written about it fairly often. I like rain when I'm indoors, when all I have to do is listen to it fall from inside the warm, safe confines of an enclosed space. But to have to receive the fury of a storm from the ground up, my feet in flood water, rotting fish and refuse all around? Hide me now.

But I am a brave girl: I can get through anything. A little water, toxic or not, is not going to stop me.