Things that go Bump in the Night (and During the Day, too!)

Applying for Peace Corps is a long and trying process. We had to fill out an extensive application and endless forms, write essays and do a few interviews.  A benefit to this requirement of constant introspection is that it makes you really think about why you want to do Peace Corps. And for me, one of the things I kept coming back to was that I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and raise my level of tolerance.  I kinda felt like I had become a wuss in the states. I worried too much about little things that shouldn’t bother me from small daddy long-legs in the kitchen, to thinking the slightest bit of vertigo meant there was something seriously wrong. In some ways, it felt like I was already an 80-year-old! I found myself thinking about my younger, reckless teenage years when I threw more caution to the wind and took a lot more chances.  Now, I’m not saying I always made the smartest decisions then and that there’s some things I’m glad have changed since those days, but I missed my “eh, don’t worry about it!” attitude. I had a sneaking suspicion that moving half way around the world to a new continent, full of bugs, would do the trick.

My initial glimpse of creepy crawlies happened during the first 10 weeks here while in training in Namaacha.  During our first night of homestay, a cockroach, almost the same size as my hand, made an appearance on our bedroom wall. We were lying down, about to go to sleep when we spotted him in the corner. I let out a girlie yelp and instinctively stood up on the bed for fear that it would find my feet (we hadn’t hung our mosquito net yet). Chris quickly grabbed a shoe and smashed him, and thus began our life full with bugs. Aside from cockroaches, Namaacha also had an abundance of long, chunky brown millipedes they called “Maria Cafés”. I would later learn these are actually called the African Giant Millipede and are all over Mozambique. Sighting one of these on a weekly basis is pretty common.  I was lucky that Namaacha broke me in easy, because the nasty bug friends came out in full force once I got to site. My very first night in Mapinhane, I had a close encounter with some bats. Maybe they’re not an insect, but a creepy crawly none the less. Although it was a dark and stormy night, the adrenaline from finally arriving to our site gave me courage. Our bathroom was outside of our house and had no electricity, but I would brave the storm with a lantern and go take a bucket bath before bed. I had already dealt with cockroaches and millipedes, how bad could it be? I was just pouring the last cup of water for a final rinse when I heard something above my head. I couldn’t tell what it was but it sped up the bathing process none the less. Then, the creature landed on my foot which caused me to abruptly run out of the shower house, screaming, with the towel barely concealing my lady parts. When I reached the house, breathing heavily, I told Chris I had encountered something, although I wasn’t sure what it was. He took a flashlight into the bathroom, like the dutiful husband he is, to investigate. He returned only to say, “Uhhh, you don’t even want to know”. Turns out bats were flying overhead and crawling on the floor, and apparently wanted to let me know they were sharing the bathroom with me. Shortly after the batty night, I found a scorpion chilling inside the house which I promptly killed with one of my favorite toxic substances, Bygone (a spray that kills insects) but it was still quite jarring. Then, a special guest appeared during my very first day of teaching in my very first lesson. A big-ass (and I mean HUGE) hairy tarantula was crawling on the wall in the back corner. The kids said “não faz mal, teacher”, meaning it won’t do any harm but I still wanted to crawl out of my skin. Tarantulas, in my opinion, are the DEFINITION of all that is creepy/scary/gross about bugs and insects. They really hit that biological instinct of danger for me. When I was a kid, I thought gremlins were hiding in my closet but it changed to tarantulas when I got older (although I won’t lie and say I’m no longer scared of gremlins, because they still freak me out. Seriously. Watch the movie. Sooooo not for kids).  It was not an uncommon theme to see these hairy beasts in my nightmares, as this was the visual form my subconscious chose for my fears. So knowing all this, you would think I’d have run out of the classroom screaming, just like I did with the bats, but surprisingly I didn’t. A part of me sure wanted to, but I actually kept my composure much better than I would have if I was not in front of my new students. I couldn’t have them think their new American teacher couldn’t handle a stupid spider that wasn’t even harmful. So I breathed, tried to forget about it, and was lucky enough to have a camera with me that day to get photographic evidence. And I survived. The classroom tarantula gave me a huge boost of confidence that my tolerance had gone way up. And might I add, since that day, I haven’t once had a nightmare involving a spider.  After the initial incidents, human and bug life lived pretty harmoniously for a while. We shared our house with tons of geckos, cockroaches and termites. We found all kinds of spiders like daddy long legs, the charging variety, and wall spiders spanning the size of a small drink coaster. But they no longer bothered me. In fact, I’d watch the geckos and spiders eat pesky, buzzing house flies and mosquitoes and found myself cheering for them! And now, I’ve even taken to naming some of the critters that make a daily appearance like Norman, the wall spider who lives behind the truck in my bedroom or Raul, the gecko who hangs out by the front window at night. We did have a few surprises thrown in the mix. A rat who really enjoyed dry pasta. And the moth larvae that were falling through our mosquito net at night. Or the sand fleas that set up shop in the bottom of our feet, requiring a morning of digging with a needle (all together now, “EEEEEWWWW”). But these were really more of a nuisance then cause for fear. In the last week though, our creep-tastic bug cred has gone through the roof. Chris and I were sitting on our front porch, cooling down after a long run, when suddenly I hear Chris say, “oh.my.god”. “WHAT, WHAT?”, I yell. “It’s a snake! Go get the machete!” Sure enough about 50 feet from us, a large snake with its head rearing, is staring in our direction. I run inside per Chris’ request but then ask him if it’s really a good idea to kill this thing. But if we’ve learned one thing from our Mozambican neighbors, you can never let a snake live because of the poisonous factor. So Chris slowly tip-toes behind the snake’s line of site and WHACK!!!!!!!!! He cuts the dude’s head off with a machete. Yeah, that happened. He throws down the machete a few more times just to make sure he’s dead, then we find out it needs to be burned so his friends don’t come looking for him. All of this too, has been photographed if you don’t believe me by the way. Afterwards, we went on the internet to see if it was that infamous Southern African snake, the black mamba, which is not uncommon around our village in the bush. From our Mozambican eye-witnesses and the picture on wikapedia, we’re pretty sure it was. Chris earned major badass points that day, and it was one of those situations where you think, “wow, I can’t believe this is my life!”. Then a few days ago, my bug tolerance was put to the ultimate test. It was a normal night in our electricity-less house, when I wanted to put something away in a small room we use as a pantry.  I opened the door and shined the flashlight in, and there he was, as if he wanted to be spotted. Another big-ass, hairy tarantula. Not as big as the one in my classroom, but still quite large and ummm, oh yeah, THIS ONE IS IN MY HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My natural reaction is what told me I’ve definitely graduated from daddy-long-leg worries. I breathed in, shut the door and calmly told Chris that there is a spider in the room. And I mean a big one. He opened the door to take a look and confirmed that my eyes were not deceiving me, that indeed, a tarantula was hanging out in our pantry. Unsure of how to kill this thing, we called our Mozambican friend to come over. He said that while they can bite, he assured us they’re not aggressive and “não faz mal”, but suggested we take a machete to if we, understandably, didn’t want it living in our house.  He took a swing for it, but it bolted too quickly into the corner. And believe it or not, that’s the end of the story. Yes, you heard that right. There is a living tarantula somewhere in my pantry.  And I’m not having a panic attack. Our friend thinks that he’s probably been living there for quite some time based on how big he’s gotten, so I keep telling myself if he wasn’t a problem before, he shouldn’t be now. I used to pop in at night without a flashlight, which I will no longer do since we spotted him, but I will still go in there. l wonder if he’ll make another appearance every time I open that door, but I still have the courage to open it. So today I feel a sense of pride. I’ve come face-to-face with one of my biggest fears, living in my house no less, and did not go crazy. Now, maybe I am jinxing myself and there will be a much scarier part #2 to the tarantula in my pantry story. But as of now, I’d still say that fits the requirement for stepping out of my comfort zone. Of course, there are endless opportunities to do this here: speaking a new language, being in a new culture, living with no electricity, dealing with sickness and being the weird foreign language teacher in a classroom of 60 kids. So, while I still may have problems with gremlins, I think my teenage self would be very proud of my progress.