Mud Breaks Down in the Rain????

Greetings again from Mali! I’m doing well here… but my house is falling over. The nice thing about mud buildings with grass roofs is that they stay relatively cool even in the hot season. The bad thing is they don’t stand up to the kind of rain we’ve been getting in Madoubougou over the past month.
First I noticed a few drips coming through the roof- no big deal; water dries. It started getting worse, but I figured it was a small price to pay for the coolness I’d enjoyed in March and April. Then one part of my latrine wall fell over. That was mildly annoying, but I threw up a makeshift plastic wall for privacy and wasn’t too worried. Other people’s walls were coming down, too. It’s just the way rainy season is. 5 days ago more of my latrine wall fell over, and I thought to myself, “This is getting old…” but little did I know.
On Sunday we got the biggest rain yet. The open area to the east of my house has a hole dug out about 40 feet across and maybe 6 feet deep from people using that dirt to make mud bricks. On Sunday it turned into a small lake, with water pouring in from uphill to the east and emptying out around my house once it started to overflow. It didn’t go in the front of my house because of my concession wall, and I stood out there watching it for a while. The rain just kept coming. Sitting in my house waiting for the rain to quit, I was startled by a chunk of the inside wall falling from above the door that connects the 2 sides of my house. There were 2 big cracks in the wall, too. Once the rain let up a bit, I went to go tell Fousseynou and my host dad, Lamine, about the wall. Opening the door was slightly more difficult then usual, and I realized the front wall of my house settled (which is apparently not a good thing). I eventually realized the whole east side of my house had settled, causing the aforementioned cracks in the wall plus a few in the floor. When Fousseynou and Lamine saw all that had happened, they decided I needed to get all of my things out of the house immediately. Nothing has actually fallen over, even to this point, but it probably wouldn’t be all that cool to be inside the house if/when it finally does.
Now I’m living in one of the classrooms at the school, which is actually nicer than my house, until we get something else figured out. We’re going to rebuild the house, but that has to wait until rainy season is completely done- around the end of October. With school starting in September, I’ll need to move to a different temporary location. Right now it looks like that will be the community storage unit next to my house. It’s one of the few buildings with a cement floor, and it even has a tin roof. First we need to move the few things presently being stored in there, clean it out a bit and put another window in it so I don’t cook inside. And it’s not like my house is the only one needing to be worked on. Other people’s latrines and storage buildings have fallen over, and my host family spent yesterday morning repairing a leaky roof on one of there houses. However, everybody is willing to help make sure I’ve go a suitable place to live, and the school is working out just fine right now. Really, everything is ok. And we started the women's class on reading and writing numbers last Friday! 9 women came, despite the rain. (it was in the school.) Stand by for more exciting stories :)