This will be a short blog, and not really an update which I’ll try to do this weekend. Back home people asked me for bug stories, but the best I could really come up with were the ants constantly invading my food and the shoe-sized cockroaches scuttling around my shower when the power was out (and biting me in the neck when I slept on the floor). Now that I have some disturbing critter stories I thought I’d share while they’re still fresh in my mind:
1. This one is probably the least gross. There are about 4 or 5 cats that live on the residence grounds, though they all refuse to be touched and are super skittish around people. All of them are black and white, and all seem to follow directives from the biggest cat, who always has a scrunched, grumpy, grandpa face, leading me to believe they are all somehow related. Since I adore cats, and always want a pet so badly, I’ve been attempting in vain to win their love and approval. One habit I picked up at Xavier, especially when there was not a whole lot of food to go around, was never to waste leftovers. So rather than throw food in the trash (especially meat which I am finding harder and harder to eat), I toss it outside to the cats. Now whenever I walk by or open the door, they run over to me meowing, expecting some kind of treat… but still if I bend down to pet one, they run off into the bushes. And yet, I know they love me. In our “dining room” there’s a full length window from floor to ceiling and now when I am eating breakfast or dinner, all too frequently one of the cats comes to the window, paws on it, and leaves a headless rat by the door. This seems to happen too often to be coincidence, so I take it as a sign that the cats feel some affection for me, and they choose to express it through their morbid little presents. True love, really.
2. I first discovered these next critters in Chuuk, but soon realized they are here as well. They are called plaster bagworms, and while much less insidious and destructive than their fellow invasive insects, the termites (which I can clearly hear chomping away at my walls at nighttime and awake to find little puddles of sawdust all over my room), they are more gross and do a better job at hiding themselves which is more disturbing. They are a little hard to describe, but basically they are flat little grey or brown things… they look very much like a squished dust bunny and for most of last year, that’s what I thought they were until one day when I picked one up and saw to my revolted shock a little worm head popping out of its flat shelter. After finding multiple of these around my room, often in my bed, I finally decided to google them since no one seemed to know what they were. Apparently, these specific worms weave protective cocoons out of dust, hair, and pieces of fabric, hence the dust bunny appearance. If I remember correctly, they’re completely harmless… just kind of icky.
3. You would think that living in Pohnpei with American priests who are used to getting waited on and having the best of everything (despite this mythical vow of poverty I hear so much about) that there would be an overwhelming amount of food in the house, but I quickly realized that with the exception of dinner which is prepared for them by a local cook, the other residents sustain themselves mostly on canned soup, spam, ramen, bread, and peanut butter. I took myself to the “supermarket” to buy some more appetizing and nutritious foods since I usually have lunch at the house, and of course boxed macaroni and cheese was high on the list. I couldn’t find the Kraft blue box kind which I used to love in college, but there was a similar brand, and even better one that didn’t require milk and butter – two things we don’t have much of. When later that week, I poured the first box into boiling water I noticed little black things rising to the top. I thought it was just burnt crust from the pot, but as I scooped them out with a spoon, I noticed these little things had shells and legs and claws. Probably only the size of large carpenter ants, these bugs were unlike anything I’ve ever really seen. They looked like miniature aliens with curved backs and strange claw-like apparatuses on their many little legs. At first they kind of reminded me of giant-sized lice, but that thought was completely unappetizing so I tried finding another, more benign association, but failed. Since I already had boiled the pasta, and the thought of wasting food and money doesn’t generally appeal to someone on a volunteer’s salary, I decided to eat it anyway. I drained the water, and rinsed the pasta, thumbing through the noodles to pick out these bug carcasses wherever I could. I’m sure I still ate some, and the thought of this kind of repulsed me at the time, but the prospect of opening a fresh, uninfested box the next week was somehow reassuring. A few days ago I decided to eat the other box I bought. I opened it and before even boiling any water, sifted through the macaroni to see if the bugs had attacked that one as well, but couldn’t find any. Feeling victorious, I started to cook it… only to realize that once again the bodies of the boiled bugs floated to the top of the froth. I don’t know where these bugs were hiding. I figure they must actually cling inside the noodles or something like that. Anyway, I ate this pasta too and so far, still feel fine. No harm, no foul.
4. This last story probably ranks the worst, at least from my point of view. Pohnpei is home to several more kinds of spiders than Chuuk, at least from what I’ve observed. The famous wolf spiders are here too, but there are also tarantulas (after seeing a small one, I made sure to research this!) and several other kinds of very pointy, vicious looking things that hover menacingly from their expansive webs. Outside one particular window in the residence, there are probably 5 or 6 massive black spiders with neon backs. It makes me shudder to think they are so close to being inside the same house as I am, and I try to not think about them dangling from my ceiling while I sleep. They all live in one vast, connected web resting, it seems, innocuously. On the window to which they are adjacent, there are these furry things which look like some kind of burr. Since I came here I have been trying to figure out what these things are that look like small balls of dust stuck to the widow. Last night while standing in the kitchen I decided to have a closer look. It was then I realized that these things are not stuck to the window, but rather stuck in the web. After careful inspection I realized that they are not burrs or some other kind of mysterious plant life, but rather basically coffins – the woven traps of insects caught in the spiders’ web. I could see the outlines of some shriveled, empty bug corpses caught inside these death cocoons. And, even more to my horror, when I looked even closer I could see tiny, tiny white dots everywhere on the web: miniscule baby spiders – hundreds and thousands of them; newly hatched evil being unleashed on the world. I know spiders are good – the ones here are generally harmless even if they are capable of biting, and they keep worse bugs away. But they LOOK so terrifying, especially in such foreboding numbers. They are only fascinating outside my house: right outside my window is way too close.
All this talk of animals reminds me of a quote I love that I think says a lot about my experiences here:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
-Mary Oliver
I like to think even though I find certain creatures much less appealing than others, that we can somehow work together: I'll keep feeding the cats if they keep rats out of my kitchen. I will leave the spiders alone if they eat mosquitos that might perhaps be carrying something unpleasant like Dengue fever. Or, at the very least, maybe we can just learn to silently and benignly coexist, doing what makes us happy, not causing harm to each other, and not feeling guilt or regret for just being who we are.
Anyway, this was just something brief to keep everyone in the know! :) hopefully I can update with something more cheery this weekend!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment