Those few days we were in General Cepeda, drought was mentioned many times. It had been twenty years, the people we visited said. Twenty years of drought.
The last full day we were there, it rained. and since the mission house is typical Spanish style, it is built around an open courtyard. A couple of the permanent missionaries got it rolling, and it didn’t take long:
Fun, yes, but what trouble was to come…
In the weeks since, Alex has pounded northern Mexico with storms. The drought may be over, but the difficulties brought by these storms – death, mudslides, flooding – have been serious. The need, of one type or another – never ends.
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Your photos are living proof that text fails to capture so much of life. Very enjoyable.
Favorite rain verse from Octavio Paz:
“Listen to me as one listens to the rain.”
I was so glad when I found out Alex was going to bypass our part of Texas, but then I realized that meant it was going to hit Mexico. Do you have a recommended charity for hurricane relief? (you may have put a link like that on another post)
Really love these photos.
They should organize that as an Olympic sport !
in another vein, the arrid conditions have obviously been mastered to some extent (the Spanish were familiar with desert agriculture since most of the interior of the Iberian peninsula is similarly dry)
There’s Moorish connections also, where the techniques of qanat water management can be traced along the Silk road from Iran to China :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpan_water_system
here’s the fertile greenery of market gardens amidst barren rocks as seen from a Nasa satellite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alluvial_fan_in_Iran.jpg
Human ingenuity knows no bounds – I’m not a big fan of spectator sports but I’d pay to watch “Extreme Makeover – Farm Edition” – maybe EWTN can get together with some of those urban gardening monks and publicize their best efforts as a corporal work of mercy? Just a thought!