Swept Away

So I woke up this morning and there was no power, no water, and a big chunk of our fence missing. And now I shall explain why this all happened.
Last night was a night like any night. Some volunteers and I headed across the street to Mzungu Bar to get some drinks and meet up with some local friends. We were excited because that night we were heading out to watch a football (soccer) match between Liverpool and Chelsea. Tanzanians are crazy about football and quite a few are huge Manchester United fans, don't discuss football with them unless you really know what you're talking about. As we were at Mzungu Bar it started pouring rain, so we called a cab. But the cab wanted to charge way too much because they felt like they could hike the price since it was raining. But we showed them, we walked, which went fine but man was it muddy. We got there and enjoyed the game, professional soccer players have inhuman skills out there on the field, but some of us were saying how we would like it a lot more if they wouldn't flop all the time, faking an injury to try and get a player carded.
We walked back from watching the game, got rained on, got even more muddy, but for the most part it was fine. But as soon as we had stepped inside an absolute torrent started falling outside. So afterward the power went out. Later on many of the volunteers were woken up by an odd chanting, is was the nearby police academy doing their daily march, something which is usually drowned out by the sound of the fans in our rooms which weren't working due to lack of electricity. Some of the volunteers had also been awakened by the sound of a part of the CCS fence falling over, though not many because the rain was so hard and so loud against the tin roof that something like a fence falling over could be drowned out by it's sound.
To understand what a force of nature this is, you must first understand the nature of the CCS fence. The fence is comprised of huge bougainvillea bushes that have grown around chicken wire that is held up by wooden beams, so these things are pretty sturdy and a commonly used form of fencing in Moshi. But essentialy in the middle of the night a flash flood had torn through our compound and in the process totally downed a part of our fence. When I walked to placement today there were small uprooted trees on the side of the road, the terrain had completely changed by the amounts of sand that had been displaced, and the mud was rediculous. One of the volunteers who goes to juvy, Nicole, lost here sandals to the mud and had to go back to get rain boots. Later that day I found that businesses had been flooded, crops and homes washed away, and generally many lives were shaken and/or ruined by the rains. To try to lighten spirits I said, "maybe people were praying too hard for the rain."