Since I arrived in San Pedro last week, my sleep has been interrupted each night by the sudden loud bangs of avocados falling from the tree beside my homestay onto my corrugated-iron bedroom roof. However during the violent storm that has continued to brew this Sunday afternoon, there was an enormous bang above my head as I studied the past tenses of Spanish verbs, a noise that I immediately realised was too loud to be even a prize-winning, Guinness Book of Record qualifying Guatemalan avocado.
Subsequent
investigation by my hostess Rosa and myself confirmed that a large branch had
fallen from the avocado tree, mishaping the roof and guttering outside my bedroom.With Felipe away and the other four men of the house too busy colouring in cartoon characters, it was therefore up to the extranjero guest of the house to step in, extricate the branch from the roof and then come up with an engineering solution that would minimise the leaking of rainwater from the damaged guttering onto the muddy lake that has already formed on Rosa's vegetable patch since the rain began.
I shouldn't joke as Rosa was visibly upset by the permanent damage that has been done to her crop of vegetables, but personally I think my four years of electrical and mechanical engineering at University did me proud in the subsequent feat of engineering that I put in place to limit further damage. I have as yet been unable to take a good photograph due to the significant risk of coming across as a heartless extranjero pig, but to describe my solution's basic essence in words: I used a spare sheet of corrugated metal to siphon the rainwater flooding from the broken roof guttering away from Rosa's vegetable patch.....and onto a neighbours garden.
I shouldn't joke as Rosa was visibly upset by the permanent damage that has been done to her crop of vegetables, but personally I think my four years of electrical and mechanical engineering at University did me proud in the subsequent feat of engineering that I put in place to limit further damage. I have as yet been unable to take a good photograph due to the significant risk of coming across as a heartless extranjero pig, but to describe my solution's basic essence in words: I used a spare sheet of corrugated metal to siphon the rainwater flooding from the broken roof guttering away from Rosa's vegetable patch.....and onto a neighbours garden.
the scene before my feat of engineering but after my extrication
