sweat on the sand

It is hot in Melaque.


No.  That's not correct.  It should be hot in Melaque.  This is October.


Melaque has two seasons.  Hot and unbearably hot.


Hot runs from October through April.  Unbearably hot from May through September -- with moments of just hot when the rains arrive.


The calendar says the hot season should be here.  The arrival of northern short-term tourists underlines the expectation.  It is October and the voice of the Canadian is heard throughout the land.


But it is still unbearably hot.  As I draft this post, the temperature is 90 degrees.  The humidity is 70%.  There are enough drops of sweat on my reporter’s notepad to confuse it with a tween girl’s diary.


One of the benefits of our recent storm was a period of cool weather.  But the price for comfort was far too high.  I have already written about the flooding and the laundry project Christine initiated (laundress to the stars).  The reappearance of the sun has helped us get loads of laundry dry and back to their owners.  It appears that project is drawing to an end.

 

While picking up laundry, I noticed most of the homes had not yet been cleared of mud.  That got me to thinking of the neighbors of our new church palapa (which is looking more and more like a finished building).  They suffered some of the worst flooding -- at least, from the force of the water.


Tom, our summer pastor, and I decided to survey the neighbors to see if they needed any help cleaning out their homes.  Actually, Tom did the talking.  His Spanish and sensitivity for Mexican culture made him the obvious spokesman. 


It turned out that all of them had cleaned up their places and were back to normal.  Well, as normal as they could be with the loss of refrigerators and stoves.


We did discover, though, just how lightly balanced the Melaque economy is.  Most of the families had work.  But they could not work during the flood.  As a result, most of them were running short of food for their families.

Tom arranged to purchase food from a local wholesaler.  To get as many food bags as possible, he cut a couple of items off of the list.  The wholesaler volunteered to put the bags together for us -- and then donated the items that we had removed from our list.


That is Tom (at the top of this post) standing next to the Shiftless Escape with the bounty we were about to distribute.  I took the photograph near the food wholesaler warehouse.  But, If you look closely on the right, you will see a woman on a direct course to ask for one of the food bags.


Tom, Rosa (a Spanish-speaking member of our congregation), and I distributed a bag each to the neighbors of our church building.  The moment the truck showed up in the neighborhood, people were in the streets asking for bags.  But we requested them to return to their homes.  It was easier for us to be certain we had placed at least one bag at each home that way.


The laundry and food bag projects got me thinking about my dislike of hot weather.  For me, a perfect day is 55 degrees, overcast, with a nice light drizzle.  But I can tolerate a lot when it comes to the weather.


And then I felt rather petty when I remembered my neighbors.  They had lost almost everything when their homes were flooded.  But they accepted the fact that the flood was over and they now needed to return to their lives.  All they needed was a bit of food to get on with it.


Between laundry deliveries today, I stopped for lunch at Señor Froy’s -- one of my favorite beach restaurants.  Froy lost part of his palapa in the wind storm.  But it is fixed, and he is back in operation.


As I sat there looking at his new roof and the cleaned-up beach, I realized just how nice it is to simply sit and enjoy this beautiful part of Mexico.


And weather is not going to get in my way of doing that.