I’ve always enjoyed rain. I love it for sentimental reason; it’s the combination of how the sky turns grey and then the heart turns blue. But you know, I think everyone agrees that rain slows you down. When your life gets so busy running around from one place to another in a big city, then rain comes, it’s your chance to take a brief pause.

But since my year in Suatang, the rain has been something else. Water is something rare here especially when the dry season comes. At home, when rain doesn’t come for a week then I can be pretty sure that we have no water for shower or anything else. I’ve experienced the everyday shower with only a small bucket of yellow-ish water. I’ve gain the skill of washing my hair and my body with that small amount of water. It’s not clean but at least I shower.

You see, people always have different thing to be grateful of. Now I feel grateful of the rain. I’ve seen happy faces when the rain comes. I know there’s the feeling of wanting to come out in the rain to play; that is maybe the result of happiness and romanticism that are shown in one of those tv commercial. Here, when the rain comes, we grab every buckets and big water containers out. There goes the water for some days ahead. It’s not romantic. It’s still playful. It’s mostly gratitude.

Things are so simple here. I learn to see life as it is. I learn to take what is given, like the rain. Beauty is something so common that we need to learn it to turn it into something meaningful.