Dancing Through The Rain

Dancing Through The Rain…with my best boyfriend!

We had the wildest, wettest, funnest day today. We live next to a large brown river the size of the Mississippi, the Berbice River. There is a ferry that crosses back and forth all day long. It takes about 25-30 minutes to make the crossing, but it has no schedule so you just go to the ferry and wait. Usually, you don’t have to wait for more than an hour, but…..if you are wanting to take your car on the ferry, you will have to wait anywhere from 3-7 hours, depending on how many cars and trucks are in front of you in the line. Trucks have first precedent.

The ferry is very old and twice in the past little while it has “gotten loose” and headed towards the floating bridge they are building across the river not far downstream. The ferry has hit the bridge both times, damaging it and setting back the schedule of when the bridge will be finished.

This is the view from the ferry as you land on the other side of the Bervice River.

We have 4 elders who live across this river who are part of our zone of 16 elders. The senior couple upstairs and we are in charge of looking out for these elders, paying their rents, checking on their apartments, finding them a new apartment when needed, visiting their District Meetings, etc. We are getting 4 more elders added to our zone next week. We were assigned to find another apartment for 2 of the new elders who will be living in a village across this river.

Dad and I agreed to go look at the apartment once more that we had viewed last week to make sure we could find a spot for a washer, hook up the water filter system at the kitchen sink and fit 2 beds in the living room. Elders have to sleep in separate beds but in the same room and the living room was the only room that might hold both double-sized beds.

Dad adamantly said, “We are not taking the car on that ferry!” There was no discussion about that and I fully agreed. There is only one main road that connects all the towns. There are taxi buses that are on the other side of the ferry that will take you wherever. There are no addresses so you just have to look for landmarks to remember where any place to where you want to return .

We met the elders just as we got off the ferry and they insisted that a man in their branch, Samaroo, knew a perfect place that was new and much better than the apartment we had found. So we decided to track it down and look at it before we committed ourselves to our find. They said we just had to tell the bus driver to take us to village #30 (apparently the villages are numbered but we never saw any numbers displayed) to the 7th Day Adventist Church and then take a right and a left and we’d see the longest wooden plank bridge we’d ever seen over the swamp to the front door of a house and we would know that that would be Samaroo’s house. We drove 30 minutes before the bus driver finally said, “We’re here.”

Everything went fine except the rain. The taxi driver happened to know Samaroo and took us right to his house and let us out. By this time we were fairly wet because it had been raining all morning. But now it was a downpour. We had two houses to visit, Samaroo’s and his mother’s across the street. The one board wide bridge that extended across the swamp to Samaroo’s was longer than I could ever imagine. I just kept imagining myself if I lived in that house as a young mother carrying my baby with me on that wild adventure of walking to and from the front door every time I wanted to leave the house.

I counted the steps as I walked and there were 103 of them. And, oh dear, it was elevated up about 3 feet above the swamp and those planks had been there a long time. There was just a very small wobbly railing along most of one side. If you fell, you’d fall in the swamp. I looked for alligators but didn’t see any signs of one. It was a real experience to traverse those boards. Some of them were barely tacked down and bounced up and down as we stepped along them. I was so disappointed I didn’t have my camera with me. But I found someone who had some photos of the "bridge to Samaroo's house".

The trip to Samaroo’s house was a wild goose chase but I loved it. By the time we caught the next taxi bus back toward the apt. we had originally set out to rent, the panty girdle I was wearing and the money in dad’s wallet were soaked. When the 2nd taxi let us out, we had 6 more blocks to walk to the apt…and back…all of this through this wild rainstorm. We had one small umbrella with us and the wind was blowing so the umbrella was of no use most of the time. We made all the arrangements to rent Auntie Baby’s apartment for the elders and made our way through the storm back the 6 blocks to the main street to hail another taxi bus back to the ferry.

By the time we made it back to the ferry, rode it back to New Amsterdam, and then walked the 1 ½ miles to our apt. there wasn’t one part of us that was dry. We had been gone 7 wet hours, and no, there hadn’t been anything for us to eat until we made it back home. But, I kept telling dad, “That was the funnest day. I just loved being with you all day in the rain!”