Inside the house is as dark as at five in the morning, with the same infrequent squawks of chickens and the odd shout from the road, almost no-one is out. All day the nieces lie huddled under the covers, sleeping or murmuring on their cell-phones. An odor of kerosene pervades the corridor, it was used to light the charcoal fire - there is a big plate of rice and some boiled cabbage at noon. There may be something else before dark, or maybe not. The first day of rain everyone ate more to ward off the chill, now they are too bored even to cook or eat. All the clothes are damp, and the walls sweaty to the touch.
Poultry, cats and small boys huddle disconsolate on the gallery. The spare buckets and pans are up in the roof-space, catching drips, but the wind shakes the house enough that coffee beans are dislodged from between the rough-sawn ceiling boards, they may have been there for years, this house was for a long time a grocery store and coffee depot.
Outside a low cloud descends, from time to time, and becomes thin mist. The ground is sodden but the paths no longer slippery with red mud, since only the stones remain.
The occasional house has a small gathering on the porch, most are shuttered until better weather. Nobody came from the market today or brought the bread in a big basket on his head, nobody sang as they usually do.
There was a hiatus, when it looked like clearing, and we were briefly animated, then more rain and the torpor of chilled reptiles used to the sun.
Mme Bob stirs herself to make a hot dish of black beans, very soupy with the heaviest dumplings in the world! I give the eldest niece, who is citified and bored, an English lesson - concerning jobs, introductions, and the placement of objects... above, behind, etc. The rain is so loud on the tin roof and her intonations so different that I cannot always tell if she is repeating what I've said.
The domino game on the gallery is now in it's eighth hour, with mostly the same players though they circulate a little.
There is no more kerosene when the lamp runs out, and there hasn't been cooking gas for days. Every chair supports a wet towel or shirt. Piles of small black beans wait to be sifted free of chaff and dust - it cannot be done in the rain - from a flat woven grass tray one shakes and flicks away from the body, out in the garden.
Sometimes the rain is so loud I can't distinguish French from Creole, or maybe the distinction is blurring?
I was thinking what a peaceful village this is... in spite of the weather, the boredom, the availability of the clairin (local high-proof rum) - there are no fights, no arguments at the dominoes, no shouting.... it has rained about 20 inches in three days and all the roads are washed out, including the half-built lifeline to the outside world everyone has carried rocks to, for the last three weeks. Down on the coast people are swept away and drowned in the floods, we hear via the tinny radio and a few phone calls.
Everyone is wearing everyone else's clothes to keep warm, just as they find them - I have Timo's football jacket, he has his mother's floppy blue felt gardening hat on, the young men have T-shirts tied round their heads like banditos, and Clairyanne, the youngest niece, goes all day under a red towel like a statue of the Virgin.
It is three days outside of life for us, but in other houses in the village a grandmother living alone with a small child must go out and find another yam to boil, keeping the fire alight all the time as there are no matches, a man has spoken to no-one but his toddler and the memory of his dead wife so far this week, a family are coughing together in a heap of damp rags as their mud and field-stone walls dissolve visibly below the holes in the tin roof.
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