Heavy Rain Fall

By Pasquelle van der Jagt

After visiting all kind of activities at different schools this weekend, today it was time again to work for our project with the schools in the coastal area.

At first we went to SMPN 31. Last week we already did tree planting with them and today we came back to give them a workshop about ‘How to compost’. I gave the students a presentation about the composting process. In the meantime Mandy interviewed the principal about the school and its environment projects. Hereafter we did composting with the children and they taught the cantine ladies about the composting process. We also made a schedule of which children are responsible for which composter, so in the next period these kids will take care of their own composter.

Today we also had to hand out some Awards and Certificates. At first one Award at SMPN 31, where Alif Permana Wijaya got an Award for the second place on the short comic story he had made during the Air Pollution Campaign last Saturday. The first place was for Vicky Wijaya a student from SMPN 15. Besides every student that joined the Air Pollution Campaign last Saturday, receives a Certificate.

For me there was something totally new today, after our composting workshop it started to rain… and then I mean really rain! I’m used to a whole lot of rain in The Netherlands, but I’ve never seen so much rain coming out of the sky on the same time. In the Netherlands the rain is more spread out over the day. After I think one hour, half of the school’s area was under water and it still rained so hard. When we wanted to go back to the car we needed to put off our shoes. The water came already above my ankles and still by walking only a few meters through the rain I became really wet!

We drove back to Tunas Hijau and the river near SMPN 31 was already floated and the whole road was under water.  I think that in some places the water was for sure more than 30 cm high. Luckily the rain stopped after a few hours and now everything is almost back to normal. At least you don’t have to put your shoes off anymore if you want to go out. But now I can image how the water can be so high that it almost reaches your shoulders, because if such heavy rain fall will hold on for a few days (which can happen during the wet season) you’ll hope that you have a boat nearby.