When you think you've seen it all...

You haven't. Now I'm very used to seeing people throw trash on the street. It is the norm here. When you are done with that bottle of water, chuck it out the window. Candy wrappers? No problem, throw them on the ground. Then it rains. And all the drains get stopped up from the trash, and it's the government's fault.

But the other day...well that one took the cake. First see this video

Now the next thing that happened was a young girl dragged a 50 gallon drum full of garbage over to the street, and started dumping it into our little flash flood. She wasn't the only one. Even though the trash truck does make regular stops in this barrio, and had been there only the day before, the people are accustomed to waiting for the flood, then dumping their garbage in it.

The garbage runs downward two more blocks, and then empties into a sort of canal. I don't know where it goes from there.

Once the rain stops, the water finishes running off in just five or ten minutes, and you can see the street again--now littered with garbage. The lady down the street told me that she's been living there for 16 years, and that is the way it's always been done since she's been there.

While I really think the barrio's problems with drainage are more serious than just some clogged drains, I'm sure that the trash doesn't help matters.

We have two tropical storms heading our way, and lots of rain coming up. This means flooding all over the city,at many intersections, the homes by the river and probably the same flooding over most of the nation, with some deaths as a result. Some of the flooding is self-inflicted, by people who thoughtlessly throw trash on the ground. Some is due to horrendously inadequate drainage systems. And sometimes it's just because the rain is so intense that no drainage system could handle it. But flooding is not anything unusual, just part of this Dominican Life.