Strangers in the Night

I think it is time for me to give everyone an accurate portrayal of my evenings. Sure, I spend the early twilight hours sitting outside with my family, watching the baby roll around on a mat, repeatedly failing to catch a rolling tin cup. But inevitably, there comes a time when I retire for the night into the darkness of my apartment. The good nights happen when we have electricity. The bad nights happen when we do not.

I never expected myself to be so terrified of the darkness here. Scratch that: I fully expected to be terrified of the darkness here, but I expected that time and experience would wear me down, eventually revealing a courage built up over surviving things like snake attacks to my face or cockroach parties in my pillow. My plan has not worked because my apartment has remained largely insect, animal, and creepy sound free. This is great, except that it means my imagination continues to live in fear every night.

So every night, I walk into my room, just to see the lizard sprinting across the wall and back behind my bookcase, just like you always imagine the monsters under your bed. Hiding, at the most convenient time, before you can prove their presence. I take my vitamins or the malaria drugs that give me nightmares, then I go brush off the beetles, or what I imagine as baby cockroaches dancing around cockroach eggs, from my toothbrush and use it. An important part of my bathroom routine includes turning on my non-working faucet so that I can fill a tub with water at 4am when the water turns on for one hour.

When it comes time to get into my bed, I do a spot check for crickets or dead bugs that have accumulated on my mattress during the day and brush them off. Then I pull down my mosquito net from the contraption made of dental floss on my ceiling. If we have electricity, I turn my fan on: this is essential to combat the heat, the baby termites that sometimes break into my net in the morning, and the creepy noises I hear at night. Since the incident where I awoke to three crickets taking revenge on me, I tuck my net in extra carefully, but inevitably, there is always a fly hiding somewhere in my net and I spend a good 15 minutes trying to destroy its life. Flies are really the worst here. When they’re in my net, they just act like drunken fools. Flies might be the new crickets in my life: I just want them all dead. What are they contributing to this world? If there is answer to that question, I encourage you to pass it along to me before I do something catastrophic.

I always wake up at 4am, sometimes because the water has turned on, sometimes because I’m just having a nightmare that the water turned on. My body has gotten so used to turn off the water at 4:30am that now I have to pee at that same time every night. At that point in the night, all of Senegal is finally sleeping, and that is when the noises really keep me awake. I don’t know why I’m always so scared at this point of the night. Sometimes I hear noises in the room, sometimes I hear creepy religious chanting that eventually turns out to be frogs in the road. Even if animals live in my room, I doubt they want to bother with me, and plus, I have trapped myself in a chemical net fortress far from the ground. But I just always imagine mice in mutiny and stuff.

One noise in particular nearly drove me to the edge. I would hear a rustling every night. I was convinced I had a mouse, or a mole, or a cockroach army – but in the morning, I would look for evidence and find none. No plastic bags rustled through, all garbage untouched. But night after night, I would lie in my bed and just listen, terrified. I eventually deduced that rats were living in my wall, then I deduced that they were slowly breaking through my wall, Shawshank style, and rustling my Beatles poster, because Ringo always looked like he was moving. One morning, I finally worked up the courage to peel back the poster and reveal whatever was there: a muskrat hanging out of a hole, a cockroach nest, a sheep, an alien baby. I slowly peeled back the poster and… A GRASSHOPPER-CRICKET was trapped in the duct tape behind my poster, WHERE IT HAD BEEN LIVING AND RUSTLING FOR TWO WEEKS. And that is literally how the story ends. I spent two weeks crying under my mosquito net because I thought a grasshopper was trying to kill me.

So that is what happens at night in my life in Senegal. The end.

*Note: I wrote this before the intense, life-altering insect experience of our Girls Camp during the past week. EVERYTHING HAS NOW CHANGED. I have been to the edge of bug hell and survived! But I’ll write about camp and the living conditions that challenged me as a functional human being later. Camp was fun though!