When it rains it pours…

Monday night was just like any night in my hut. I got home around 6pm, I started cooking cauliflower for dinner, and I sat down to superglue my plates back together since 3 of them fell on the ground and broke into pieces (I don’t have money to buy new plates!) I had purchased more bug killer spray and so I casually sprayed around the two rooms of my hut. I noticed that more earwigs than normal started crawling out of the wood work to die, and I quickly started to kill them with TP. Some crawled under my spare mattress on the ground, so I lifted it up to spray under there and noticed through a whole in the carpet that there was mold. UGH! So I halted the attack on the earwigs and heaved the mattress into my kitchen and pulled the rug up to mop up the mold with bleach water. I was trying to decide if I should pull the whole carpet out cause there was some mold on the bottom when I noticed a noise from my kitchen room. The earwigs, which are infesting my thatched roof, started dying, which caused them to fall from my roof to the ground. It was only a few at first, and then the numbers increased and it sounded like rain as the bugs hit the cement floor. It was by far the most disgusting thing I have ever had to deal with. I quickly gave up fighting off the mold and cooking dinner, and crawled into my bed, which has a mosquito net over it. It was the only place I could avoid the rain of earwigs. I did my best to make sure I was protected at went to sleep… kind of.

The next morning I woke up and there were hundreds and hundreds of dead earwigs all over everything. Some were still living, and crawled around fighting for life. They covered everything in my home- floor, cabinets, food, desk, table, etc. I decided to rip the carpet out of my bedroom, so I spent the first 20 mins of the morning trying to pull it out from under my furniture. It too was covered in bugs. Then I packed up my kitten and my stuff for the day and lit two smoking bug bombs that I had purchased the day before. Realizing that I had a huge problem on my hand, I had a coworker go with me to many different stores in town to find out what to do about this whole thing. I was told to buy a fogger, which is like a normal American bug bomb that you set off. I bought two, one for each room, and was told that I had to stay out of the home for 3 days. When I went back to my home around 3pm to get clothes and set off the bomb, the bug problem hit a whole new level! There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dead bugs all over EVERYTHING! I have never seen this many dead bugs before. It is easily going to take me an entire day to clean the two small rooms of my hut. I was so disgusted that I started crying. Everything was dirty and smelled like bug bomb smoke. It was the final straw.

I have since found out that this is common from thatch in the winter. You can’t really get rid of the earwigs so you just have to wait until it gets warm again. And it is better not to spray anything because they start to die and fall from the roof, which I found out the hard way. Just live with the bugs, that is what I was told. Shit.

I don’t know if I will be staying at my rondeval in Moyeni. My supervisor asked the staff to start looking for a new place for me to stay, still in a village, but maybe in an area with electricity. I don’t want to live with the bugs but I don’t want to move. It is beautiful where I stay, and my host family is nice. I have a nice home and I am getting used to not have electricity. I don’t know what to do. Just wait I guess. This is Africa, afterall.