One of my worst fears about moving to Africa was bugs. Surprisingly, they have not been as awful as I imagined. For one thing, we spray regularly. For another, I don’t spend a lot of time outdoors.
When we first came to Jos, the house had been fumigated in expectation of our arrival. Except for mosquitoes, we saw no unwelcome guests for a month or so. Brian asked when we should bomb again. In his cryptic, African way Ibro replied, “When you begin to see things that you do not wish to see.”
He was right. The usual suspects turned out to be insects in the dried beans, spiders decorating the walls, and small roaches in the pantry. Fortunately only Brian has seen a scorpion up close and personal.
The best that can be said for the spiders is they are easy to kill. Mosquitoes are probably the most dangerous, as they hold the possibility of disease. But we take our doxycycline faithfully and Brian hunts them down in our room each night. Our other line of defense is the bed-net. It’s king-sized and drapes below the ceiling fan to the floor, enveloping us in a tropical cocoon. It’s a small nuisance for those who go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but on the whole kind of romantic.
I’ve made a truce with cockroaches, at least the small ones. When I move a dish on the draining rack and one scuttles under the sink, I no longer shriek and jump. I once reached into a corner in our favorite general store, picked up a package of candles, and four or five of them dove behind the ones not chosen. I barely batted an eye and put my purchase on the counter.
But the big ones are a different story. One night last week Brian went out to watch a soccer match. After some consideration I decided to read in bed. I walked into the shadowy bathroom, scrubbed my face and began to brush my teeth. A giant cockroach caught my eye. He crept along the edge of the bathtub and made a break for the door. Grabbing a roll of toilet paper, I brought it down on his ugly little back. Not certain he was dead, I tore off a sheet or two and shrouded him within it. Squeezing ‘til I heard a crack, I buried him in the garbage beneath some crumpled cellophane.
Sometime later I heard a rustling sound. Turning on the light, I peered into the trash can. Nothing troubling, I decided–just the settling of the cellophane. A page or two later the rustling resumed. This time I grabbed a flashlight, sprang into the dark bathroom and shone it in the garbage. There was the cockroach, racing ‘round the rim like a penny in one of those centrifugal-force funnels. I screamed like a girl, knotted closed the plastic bag that lined it, and raced into the sitting room.
Brian had returned and was sitting on the couch, checking email. “What on earth?”
“A cockroach rose from the dead!” I raced around the corner to the kitchen.
“Are you perhaps saying that you failed to kill him the first time?”
Honestly, men are so unimaginative.
Live from Jos,
Karen
Cheryl said,
February 5, 2012 @ 7:04 pm
Go for it, Karen! You can conquer them. We are rooting for you! Cheryl