Cambodia: It's raining, it's pouring, the White Giant is snoring.

It starts with wind. Gusting gales that bang my shutters closed and open and closed and open again. Blustery blows that somersault the laundry on the clothesline and choreograph dances for the trees. Wind that whirls the skies into water and sends it crashing to Earth.

That’s how the rain starts.

It usually ends an hour or two later, but in between it pours. None of that sissy sprinkling. Cambodia gets it hard and heavy, a barrage of liquid that leaves the dirt roads a soup of mud and debris.

Even paved roads aren’t safe. The street outside the Peace Corps office in Phnom Penh becomes a dirty brown lake every time it rains. I’ve had to wade through that knee-deep pool many a time, and saw it as only a mild inconvenience until a journey through the muck with a friend. This friend pointed out why the water we were walking in was brown: It was sewer water. This friend then tried to guess how many men had recently peed on the bordering sidewalk. I now wait out the rain in the Peace Corps office.

The rain, which pours from June or July through October or so, is vital for Cambodia’s rice fields. It’s also good for mosquitoes, which makes it not so good for people. The rainy season is the peak of dengue fever, and probably malaria as well. Both dengue and malaria are transmitted by mosquitoes.

In addition to ushering in potentially fatal diseases, the rain coats Cambodia with common colds. Whenever the rains start and the weather cools, my host dad invariably catches a cold, as do many Cambodians. Even the slightest twinge of tiredness is caused by the weather changing, my host dad claims.

I actually did catch the beginnings of a cold when the rains started this year. But I more likely caught it from my sick host dad and his son than the weather.

Despite the flooding and diseases they bring, Cambodian rains aren’t as treacherous as I expected. I had pictured people and cows swimming down the streets every time it rained. I expected all houses to be perched on stilts.

In preparation for Cambodia's floods I packed a new super-light rain coat and monsoon shoes — sandals that would keep my feet from slipping and sliding in the mud.

I’ve only worn the rain coat once or twice, and the shoes give me mountainous blisters.

Instead of the expensive new rain coat, I use a pink-spotted poncho I bought in my training village for less than a quarter. And I haven’t worn that much since training, when I actually had to be somewhere in the afternoons. Now, I stay in, on my bed under my mosquito net.

Teachers and students generally stay in, too. On one of the first days of school last year, I biked to school as usual, thinking little of the water falling from the sky to the ground around me. I arrived to empty buildings. No teachers, no students, no school director. I wasn’t early. I texted my co-teacher.

He texted back: “No school today because of the rain.”

“OK,” I texted back. “Is there never school when it rains?”

“No, sometimes there is,” he wrote.

A later conversation didn’t reveal much more. Aside from the numerous holidays, school never seems to be officially canceled in Cambodia, but if it’s raining, students and teachers rarely come. Fortunately, school is a two-minute bike ride from my house.

For a country that gets steady rain for a quarter or more of each year, Cambodia sure makes a big deal about a little water.

My host dad stresses closing all the shutters of my house when it rains, but I usually don’t bother. I like fresh air, and mosquitoes don’t. Only when I feel the rain penetrating my mosquito net or see it pooling on the floor below the windows will I bolt the blue wooden shutters.

I usually leave my laundry on the line, too. I see it as a second or third washing, and I know the clothes will be bleached dry after just a few hours under the ceaseless Cambodian sun.

After a few rains, Cambodian downpours become easy to predict. They usually arrive in the afternoons, although occasionally sneak up on me. A recent torrential rain prevented me from biking home from dinner, and on another early morning, the skies opened just as I was getting ready to bike home from a party.

Still, the rains usually come with plenty of warning. Just listen for the wind.