Most of my pet hates about life here, the little everyday things that just make it all that much more difficult, have a common them - water. Granted, I was lucky in that my area wasn't really affected by the flooding, but the stuff really is every where. It gets into my clothes and makes them smell and feel damp. It just hangs in the atmosphere making you sweat as soon as the temperature rises a little bit or you move. Drinking water may be readily available, but an innocent looking glass of clear cold water can spell weeks of illness if it contains the wrong parasites or bacteria. And of course there's the rain.

This week I was due to support a training course I'd help design with Gill (a fellow volunteer) for CARE to deliver to their partner organisations. The 1 day course was to start at 9.30am on Thursday, but to finalise the last details we all met up, Gill, the 2 CARE staff and I, on Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday morning though it started to rain, but seeing as this is the rainy season I didn't give it much thought. "It'll rain for a few hours then stop" I said to myself. Wrong. Mid-morning as I was working at my desk, a dollop of water suddenly landed on my laptop followed by a steady drip on the same spot. Rest assured my computer survived but the roof was leaking so I had to evacuate to Habib's fortunately vacant office.

Now it was lunch time, close to my departure time of 1.30pm, and it was still raining. "Surely it can't hold out much longer?" I naively thought. It did, and because it was raining none of the rickshaw pullers would leave their recently started game of cards to take me to the Dinajpur bus stop at Ranirbandar. I pottered around the office, watching the India-Australia test match from time to time, but I was beginning to think I was stranded until the rain stopped. Suddenly I heard a car pull up outside the office, and Lo! there appeared a 4x4 belonging to one of our donors. After a few indirect questions about their plans, interspersed with my own personal difficulties, they offered to lend me their driver to take me to the bus stop - Hurrah!

I eventually got to the meeting at Dinajpur around 4.30pm, a full hour late but they were waiting for me. With a cup of tea safely in my hand it then became clear to Gill and I that our colleagues from CARE hadn't done any of the things we'd asked them to to finalise the training materials. It will come as no surprise I'm sure to hear that we call these 2 guys Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or collectively "The Muppets". In the end I spent 3 hours putting the training hand-out together while Gill had them preparing the poster-sized materials we needed. By 8pm we were done, or rather we'd had enough and couldn't be arsed doing the remaining finishing touches. It was still raining.

As the training was due to start at 9.30am the next morning, and Gill and I live a full 2 hours travel from the venue near the CARE Dinajpur office, we were staying in guest rooms at the venue itself. I have to admit that we weren't overly confident about the quality of the accommodation or food that awaited us, but in the end the rooms were great, there was satellite TV (which had me up hypnotised until 1am) and we could even order Chinese take-away for dinner! It may not sound like much to you but that constituted an evening of luxury for us. By the way, it rained all night.

The Muppets had warned us that if it was raining the participants would arrive late. Sure enough we eventually started at 10am, which was ironic really as the training course was about time management. Personally, and with the exception of one of the 4 sessions, I think the course went pretty well. We really had them on the edge of their seats in the morning, but we lost a lot of energy after lunch and didn't insist enough on a few key points. The main problem though was that we were running late and trying to keep to what was already an ambitious finishing time. It all felt rushed, and unsurprisingly when we asked what they wanted to cover in the follow-up session they almost all asked for more about delegation - the last session of the day just gone.

So we'd finished, and all I had to do was go home. Towards the end of the day Gill had received a message from her boss that the buses weren't running (it was still raining of course) so she should take a train. In the end she wasn't able to do that so stayed the night with another VSO volunteer in town. Fortunately for me, or so I thought, one of the participants was driving home and could drop me at Ranirbandar on his way which would only leave me with a 20 minute rickshaw journey to get home. After the obligatory final cup of tea we set off, in the rain. I soon noticed that the streets were almost totally deserted, and the normally bustling commercial areas were devoid of activity as the shops were shut. Then I started noticing bits of trees on the road, even trees that had partially fallen across the road. At this point the man sitting next to me in the car put a word to what was happening - cyclone.

I should really have put 2 and 2 together: constant rain, wind (but not that much when I set off Wednesday), cancelled buses. The car journey to Ranirbandar went fine, and I even started nodding off a bit, but I started to realise that we were making very good time as the roads were empty. They were empty not just of cars and buses but also rickshaws. My fears were confirmed when, having arrived at Ranirbandar, I asked around and found no one willing to take me back to BRIF. The usual price is 10 taka, but in bad weather it changes. For example, when it is very hot it doubles, at night it doubles or triples, and as I found out the going rate for cyclones is quadruple. The price didn't matter as the puller was holding a monopoly - he was the only one willing to take me. With my trusty umbrella and a sheet of plastic provided by the puller wrapped around me we set off.

It was horrible out there. The rain, while not the biggest I've ever seen, as hard and horizontal. The wind in places brought us to a complete standstill. My umbrella gave up the ghost about half way and is now a contorted piece of modern sculpture in my bin. The plastic sheet offered some protection against the rain and the cold, but it was hard work to keep hold of it. As we neared BRIF, especially on the last dirt track, we increasingly encountered debris from trees, and on 2 occasions we had to go THROUGH the fallen tree as the branches lashed into our faces. We made it though, soaked to the skin and cold, and I didn't pay the guy the 40 taka we'd agreed as he didn't have any change. He got a 100 note and a pat on the shoulder for getting me home - we weren't going to haggle over money in those conditions.

If only the story the ended there. I got to my room and soon realised that the power was off, which wasn't a great surprise. What was a tad more worrying though was the splashing sound my feet made as I walked around in the dark. Once I'd got a candle lit I could see that the shutters were slightly open and that water, as well as some small palm tree leaves, had come in and formed a lake under my bed. Fortunately there wasn't much to mop up, and after wiping a towel around it was soon quite dry again. Ironically, with all the rain coming down, the air was quite dry so the floor dried quite quickly that night. I finished the evening getting some sympathy from Sarah on the phone (she was out drinking with the newly arrived volunteers...), eating jam on toast and breaking out my duvet for the first time this year since last winter.

Friday morning the cyclone had passed. It had stopped raining, I was safely snuggled under my duvet, it was the weekend and I had a lie in. When I eventually ventured out to the kitchen I saw that there was a training session on at our centre. This was good news - it meant that if the power went off the generator would come on and I could watch DVD's all day. West Wing season 3 beckoned...