Bed Bugs

Not For the Faint of Heart

One thing that I have grown accustomed to in Honduras is the prevalence of excessively large and creepy bugs. I encounter cockroaches more than anything else, which don’t bother me as much as they used to. They usually run around in my bathroom at night, but I’m always expecting them so they never surprise me. I also keep an old running shoe handy, which has found new life as a cockroach killer.

One night, not long after going to sleep, I was lying in bed when I suddenly felt something strange. I couldn’t tell whether I had just imagined feeling something crawl over my face and neck, or if it was just my sheets flapping in the breeze of my fan. I didn’t want to take chances. I launched out of my bed, simultaneously turning on the light switch and spastically brushing all over my body to rid myself of any possible creature. With the light on I looked at my bed, expecting to see a large cockroach perhaps. I still wasn’t sure if I had indeed felt anything, and wouldn’t have been surprised to find nothing. I moved my sheets around, and then turned over my pillow.

And there it was. A giant. Friggin. Ugly. MOTHER-FLIPPIN’ TARANTULA. Holy crap holy crap!!! I definitely let out some sort of cry that wasn’t 100% masculine (but thankfully, as I mentioned in another post, my walls are mostly soundproof). I leapt to grab my trusty shoe, and hesitated for a moment as I poised to strike. I didn’t want to miss, as they can move pretty quickly, and are good at hiding. Finally, I brought the shoe down and with one fell swoop crushed the sucker. I let out a sigh of relief as I saw its corpse lying motionless in my bed. In the process of disposing of the body, I decided to take pictures to prove to the world my horror and triumph:

This was actually my second encounter with a tarantula. The first was about a month earlier, back in Las Cañadas. I was just about to go to bed, when I noticed something strange on the floor on the other side of the room. Again, I let out a not-so-masculine cry as I realized what it was. Unfortunately, the house was not remotely sound proof and everyone could hear me (though they didn’t seem to pay attention to me at first). With a bit of adrenaline flowing through my veins, I carefully grabbed a boot and inched my way towards the tarantula. I planned the motion I would take as I swung down for the kill, and got as close as I could without scaring it away.

Then came the moment of truth. I swung down with all my might, but at the last second it scurried away into the corner of my room, hiding under some shelves. The area of the room was inaccessible without completely overturning all of the furniture, and I didn’t want to create a huge disturbance as everyone was going to bed. There was also a chance that it had crawled under a crack in the wall to the adjacent room, where the rest of the family slept. I let them know what was going on, and they just laughed. It didn’t seem to scare them as much.

Not knowing where the tarantula was, I decided to just go to sleep. It was pure willpower that allowed me to do so. I started to imagine that it would crawl all over me and bite me during the night, but I just told myself it wouldn’t, and that it was probably gone. Somehow it worked, and I slept soundly. There was no sign of it the next morning, and I had survived without being bitten.

The next afternoon I came home and there was a plastic bag on a shelf outside my room with something strange inside. Upon further inspection, I realized it was the corpse of a Tarantula. As it turns out, Gloria had moved the furniture around inside my room to find it as she was cleaning. She remembered where I said it had run off to in my room the night before, and apparently it was still there. She killed it without hesitation, as apparently they don’t scare her at all. Toads bother her, but not tarantulas. Go figure. Like I’ve said a bunch before, I had the best host family during training.

The Real Menace

Though cockroaches and tarantulas are easily the most disgusting and creepy creatures that I have to deal with, by far the most bothersome have in fact been the crickets. Those darn grillos. They’re slightly louder and more annoying sounding than those that could be heard at night back in the States. To make things worse, they hide inside cracks in my door where I can’t quite reach them. They never bothered me at all during training, but they manifested themselves clearly on my first night in Teupasenti.

They wait until the moment when I am just about to fall asleep, and then they start ‘singing’. It’s too loud to ignore, so I begin the hunt. As I mentioned, they hide. I use an old credit card to slide up and down the crack between the door frame and the wall, but most of the time they just crawl deeper inside, out of my reach. The commotion from my attempt causes them to quiet down, so I return to my bed and try to go back to sleep.

Then, as if they are watching me, they begin to screech again as soon I as start to relax and believe that I had scared them away for good. I debate for a moment if it is possible to just ignore them. Perhaps if I try to think about something else, the sound will blend in and it won’t bother me. Mind over matter. I have even tried plugging my ears with balled-up toilet paper. Of course, none of that ever works. I begrudgingly rise again from my bed and walk across the room to find where they are hiding. The whole dance repeats, and there are usually four or five sessions before I can bother them to the point that they stay quiet sufficiently long enough for me to be able to fall asleep. Eventually I started using bug spray to squirt at them in their hiding places in an attempt to scare them away for a longer period of time. It worked most nights, but then I started to worry about how long my bug spray supply would last at the rate I was consuming it.

One night, however, I got lucky. I sprayed into the crack, and out popped a cricket. Squish. Then, to my surprise, another popped out. Squish number two. I peered into the crack and noticed several more. A couple of sprays later and the entire family started to make a run for it. A fatal mistake. One by one, I crushed them all. Big ones, little ones, children, grandparents, cousins… All dead. I must have killed ten in all. Some of you may cry for the sanctity of life, but in that moment I appealed to Utilitarianism. The good I will be able to do for this world with the help of a consistent good night’s sleep will most likely outweigh the contribution that those useless crickets could possibly have made.

I haven’t heard a single cricket in my room since that fateful night, a few weeks ago now.

Coming Next Week(ish):

                                                                                          

It’s not all just fun and games here. I have in fact been doing some work, and in my next post I will write about what has been going on to date on that subject.