My Mosquito Net is My Safe Space. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.

Creepy crawlies galore! And I’m a wimp! I was really excited about getting out to the mato (aka boonies) and seening cool birds, etc. Heck I’m a biologist and a nerd …. I live for this stuff. So… things have not been panning out how I expected. I’ve seen: (1) humungo cockroaches. It has really been an all out war zone. Me versus the cockroaches. I sleep with the cockroach spray next to my bed so that when they wake me up with their little prickly legs scratching up against plastic bags, my suitcase, the cardboard box… I attack. I’ll do anything to get rid of them. Sometimes I even leave the little chemically crippled bodies out for a little while, just so their little roach friends can see that this is no safe zone. (2) Mini dragon – thing. Big black and caught by the dogs. Iguana? I don’t know but if you get a chance to check out the photos please don’t tell me it’s some endangered critter… I’ll feel bad. (3) Big furry spider. A friend who was visiting went on to the porch. I hear some banging and went outside to check what he had killed. It was so big and so furry that I thought the pulverized mass was a mouse. But it’s okay because apparently they only come out after rain. Too bad it rains fairly often. (4) I’ve seen a couple of little scorpions on the window frames. I wasn’t really worried about them because they are like ¼ of an inch and clear. Kinda cute, as far a scorpions go. Then my mom talked about the little ones being the dangerous ones in San Cristobal, and the missionaries said that a friend of theirs was stung by one here and it hurt for a week. (5) termites and ants. I wonder if my house will morph into the last few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude (ants take over the family and their house). The ants have already burrowed through parts of my house. You can’t really see it unless you look carefully. At junctures in the room you can see their little red tunnels moving up walls. Or sometimes mini mud towers erupt through cracks in the floor. A few nights this week there have been termite hatchings and the outside wall around the front door gets covered covered covered with them. In the morning they die or loose their wings, I’m not sure, and when the mounds of their bodies get swept out the ants take over and after a few hours there isn’t anything left.

At least the rodent problem isn’t like Namaacha (teeming would be an understatement, but they are cute compared to the woodrats, etc. of the PNW), I’ve only seen one in the latrina…. I hope he was a loner and sterile.

I like all the geckos, even though they poop everywhere, they eat lots of bugs. And I like the lizards. They are a bit fat. Again, I probably like them because they eat bugs.

It really could be a lot worse (horror stories of rats nesting in people’s mattresses), and as far as Peace Corps goes this is a cakewalk and I probably shouldn’t be whining.