During the rainy season I always wish I'll wake up to a dim, gray morning, and it will start drizzling as I drink my tea, and keep at it all day. I love how those kinds of days make you want to stay home and be cozy and read. And man, the Malians feel the same way! When it rains, they don't do anything. No one shows up to work until the sun's out and the mud is drying.

Well, I got that day today. It started around 9:00 and kept on until about 2:00. Only problem was, I had three non-cancellable meetings downtown. And it didn't exactly drizzle. It poured. And poured and poured and poured.

There were several inches of standing water on every road. I drove slowly, so as not to soak the people on the motos, but periodically someone in a 4x4 passed me, momentarily blinding me with a firehose of brown water over the windshield of my car.

The problem with the water on the road is not only that it makes the potholes bigger. It also hides them. When the car in front of you suddenly drops 18 inches and bangs its bumper on the asphalt -- swerve.

E's helpful advice: "Remember what we learned in whitewater rafting! Watch for the eddies!"

Driving was nerve wracking but walking -- wading -- through inches of brown runoff was disgusting. Those open sewers, full of other people's poop? Yeah, they're all overflowing onto the sidewalk. I came home and scrubbed my feet with hot water and antibacterial soap (in the bidet; that's the only use I've found for it).

To top it all off, my umbrella broke today. The fabric pulled back from the wires and left me with an ever-diminishing, slack coverage against the downpour. I knew it was bad when the Malians started making fun of me. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, not at all: these people will use everything until it is absolutely unusable; will patch things up and not replace them for years. That's something I truly admire. That they mocked my umbrella, to my face, told me it was probably time for a new one.

I knew exactly what I wanted as replacement: the rainbow-colored umbrella I see all over town. Later, a Malian friend told me it's so popular because it's the colors of the Malian flag. Which it is (plus blue).