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Even together, the stream quickly became too cold for us. We picked up our clothes and waded back to our inflatable mattress in the rain. Here we were faced with our original problem.

The stream had burst its banks, water reached the tops of our feet, and we couldn’t go anywhere. But we couldn’t live in a flooded tent.

Ayamin shivered as I found her rain jacket in the pack. She leant against me and we held the jacket like a roof above us as we planned our next move. Around us, people were coughing in their flooded tents.

I heard the sounds of mothers trying to hush wailing children, and young women yelling at their teargassed husbands. After the craziness of the last few hours, I began to feel a cold disappointment begin to sink in. Ayamin shivered, and I pulled her closer to me. For once our combined warmth wasn’t enough to take the edge off the cold. She still shivered and so did I.

While we stood, we saw an old man emerge from the stand of trees on the other side of the stream. He carried a long thick stick to his tent and pulled out a small pocketknife. In ten minutes, he had sharpened the end of his stick to a blade. Then, using the stick like a shovel, he began mounding up the mud into a square patch around his tent.

Ayamin and I watched. Within a few minutes he’d dug enough mud to make a small barrier around his tent and other people were emerging from the woods with sticks of their own.

Without a word, Ayamin and I were on our feet and moving towards the woods. We crossed the swollen stream using a fallen tree and crossed back over with two soon to be digging sticks. Ayamin found a place where the water level only came up to the bottom of her ankle and I sharpened the two sticks.

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We began to dig. Both of us mounding up mud into a little platform.

By the time midday had arrived, we had created a soft squishy base for our tent that hung a few centimetres out of the water.

‘Lunch?’ Ayamin said, handing me the pot of boiled rice from the night before.

I was sort of in two minds about the boiled rice. One, I was starting to hate it because rice seemed to be all we ever ate, and two, in that moment I loved it because being teargassed, mounding mud, and freezing your ass off are great ways to work up an appetite.

As we munched, I watched the family who’d given me the campfire bread when we’d arrived. The family had just finished unpacking two of their tents and were beginning to unpack a third. The grandma’s two sons came out of the tent carrying an older man in a wheelchair.

They carried him past their growing mound to a small pile of rocks they’d set up. The family stretched a small tarpaulin over the man in the wheelchair, and the grandma gave him a little food as work on the family’s mound continued.

It looked like they’d started later than us and probably wouldn’t finish before nightfall.

I looked at Ayamin, her hair and her shirt and everything were muddy and drenched, I was no better. The two of us were placing rocks on the sides of our mound to keep the mud from washing away when we sat our tent on it.

Ayamin dumped the last few rocks in place, then washed her hands in the brown water that surrounded us.

‘Phew,’ she said, ‘I am dead.’

I laughed and rubbed my own, mostly dead arms, ‘Then you’re not going to be so keen on my next suggestion.’

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Ayamin groaned, ‘You want us to make the mound two stories high with an air condition garage below?’

I laughed, ‘Love the idea… but no,’ I pointed to the family, ‘I’m not sure if they’ll make it before dark.’

Ayamin rubbed her arm, she’d worked hard, harder than I’d seen anybody work. She’d been tear-gassed, and only thought of me. The rain was still licking the ground around us and most people would be crying to go indoors in that moment.

But Ayamin, she just nodded, ‘If they want our help, we give it to them.’

She trudged through the muddy water and grabbed her stick. I shook my head, it’s a little cliché but I knew then, I truly knew, that I was in love with her.

She took my hand and together we walked to the grandma’s tent.

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