Water, Water, Everywhere And Not a Drop to Bathe In

I can't say we farang were all that prepared for the massive flooding that hit Nan this past week. While most Thais spent last Sunday morning clearing their houses and moving out to higher ground, my roommates and some of the other foreign teachers and I went out for a casual brunch followed by a lazy afternoon at the coffee shop, drawing and reading, fruitlessly trying to wait out the third straight day of hard rain to hit the province. A few Thai friends may have mentioned that they were preparing for a flood, and we noticed how high the river had suddenly become, but we only cheered when one of us got a call that school would be cancelled on Monday. Around 2 p.m., I got a call from Cho and Arm, who said we should stock up on food because there would be "a lot of water" coming. But even that dire-sounding warning didn't have much of an effect; I imagined last year's flooding in August, when a couple streets got a foot of water and school closed on a Friday, and so at the store we ended up buying things like mustard and almonds. After all, this was only the first week of the rainy season.

But then Monday rolled around. I woke up at 7 am to a call from my Thai friend Benz: "Nan have flood! I ride my bicycle in the water... Where are you? Yeah, I think you have ploblem if you leave your house today."

Ploblem, indeed: overnight, four feet of water in as many hours had spilled into our apartment compound, half-filling the first floor of our building and those around us. I went outside to see our next door neighbor shouting at her sister in the upstairs window while standing in a row boat below it... She threaded bags of food and supplies onto a handmade hook of twisted clothing hangers, while her sister scooped them up to the second floor. The rooms below us were half-filled to the ceiling with Thai-tea colored water (incidentally also filled with floating cockroaches and mounds of debris, making that comparison much less appetizing). Where drains below couldn't gulp up the water fast enough, patches of loud vicious bubbling appeared, making the water look like lava or stew. Our apartment had become an island, Soi 3 became a canal, and the main streets rivers. 

It was at least that flooded in the rest of the riverside areas, and in much of Nan city. From our second story porch we could watch the whole neighborhood out and about, sitting on rooftops or the top of stairwells, watching the water rush past, unable to go anywhere or do anything about it. Men in life vests rowed past our house in various forms of boatcraft - dinghies, longboats, motor boats - and later policemen patrolled around, bringing people water and picking up those who couldn't stay in their homes. Will and Ali, the young American teachers who live down the street from us, had been evacuated by boat from their lodge earlier that morning. 

Over the next few hours, the flood continued to rise. With my eye I marked it rising inch-by-inch on the wall of our neighbor's house, the water closing in on his bottom window sill, and over the handle bars of our bicycles nearby. By 11 am, it had risen about another half foot. Our power went out in the middle of the night Sunday, and it stayed that way for the next four days. We tried to conserve our cell phone batteries, in case we needed to call out for help, or get calls from friends. With no refrigeration or hot water, half of the food we had in our house was unusable. We munched on bread and peanut butter, and then the dry MaMa (ramen) noodles and shrimp-flavored chips that were delivered to us by a chubby tattooed Thai, volunteering with the police, who had to wade chest-deep in the flood from our driveway to our stairwell. 

Four straight days cooped up in a powerless apartment had its drawbacks. We spent most of the day neighbor-watching, reading, or snoozing in our hot stale rooms. When the sun set and we couldn't see the pages of our books any longer, we passed the time playing cards over candlelight, or doing battle in the dark with the seemingly hundreds of giant cockroach refugees who invaded our bathrooms (there is nothing more terrifying). When the water completely stopped running, we took bird baths out of tupperware containers and strategized the best ways to flush a non-flushing toilet (there is nothing more disgusting). Although we kept in relatively good spirits throughout the week, most of the time we were feeling hungry, antsy, and extremely unclean. 

Cho and our friend Dan came to visit us daily during the flood, in a newly-purchased river rafting boat, bearing gifts of tuna cans, steamed rice and leftover chocolate cake from the Best Bakery (the owner's refrigeration was down so was handing them out for free to passing boats). They described the scene outside to us. Bandon Sriserm had flooded several feet, as well as the market, most local shops and restaurants, and the city center. Patches of oil swirled along in the flood stream, leaking from the underground of motorbike dealerships. Across the river, the flooding was twice as bad; some houses had lost a wall or two as they sunk well below the water line. 

But even in the midst of relative chaos and natural disaster, the Thai smile persisted. People played in makeshift inner-tube-and-wooden-plank rafts, fishing or sending down nets to see if they might catch anything. Teenagers raced longboats down street alleys. Old ladies washed clothes on their rooftops, where kids dance around, excited to be out of school for the rest of the week. Even Cho, who had had both his house and his shop flood, just smiled and made jokes about his grumpy aunt-in-law (displaced by the flood and moved in with him) getting on his nerves. He said the flooding is okay, because "it happened before, and it will happen again." 

It wasn't until Wednesday that the flood finally started to sink away. But where water disappeared, a thick, slick, smelly layer of brown sludge was left behind - on the streets, the walls, fences; on Buddha shrines and bed frames left behind; on essentially anything touched by the flood water. On Thursday, after 96+ hours of being stranded, we were finally able to leave our apartment. We dug out and scraped clean our bikes, then wobbled over muddy filthy streets to the outside world. Some businesses in town, less hit by the flood, were up and running - but everything in our immediate neighborhood was at a standstill. 

A week later, there is still a lot of cleaning to be done. School is back in session, but an army of Army volunteers continues to come each day, washing and rebuilding parts of the first floor. Our apartment's power and running water have returned, and life is just about back to normal... But we're in the market for a raft and some rainboots, just in case.