The Ghost of Tabaski

My relationship with animals in this country has been well-documented.  From the nightly terror of strange sounds in my bedroom to the ram who tried to kill me, from the microscopic bugs who invaded every surface of my house to the cockroach who furrows into my blanket each night as though he is my puppy – I think it’s safe to say I pretty much hate them all.  Some of my friends have semi-cute domesticated puppies and kittens, but honestly, I can’t look at them without thinking about opportunistic infections.  Any inkling of pet companionship is safely eclipsed by my desire to sleep through the night, not get rabies, and live another year.  Boo to animals.

But all of the preceding moments of animal disgust, trauma, and fright were nothing compared to what happened to me on the morning of October 29.  I had just wrapped up a lovely Tabaski weekend with my family.  Tabaski, you may remember, is the holiday commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, and God’s subsequent pardon to replace the boy with a sheep instead.  Last year, my family killed three sheep for 11 people.  This year, because as my host mom says, “EVERY YEAR WE MUST GET BETTER AND DO MORE!”, we killed four sheep for 11 people.  I had given my host mom some money for Tabaski, not realizing that I was signing myself up to split a sheep with her.  This was our sheep:

Maimouna poses with my goat.  Handsome thing.

Tabaski came and went with the usual fanfare.  The men sharpened their swords with glee, the women pulled up lawn chairs to watch the slaughter.  If you imagine Tabaski as a solemn ritual sacrifice, you shouldn’t come to my house.  It was like a spectator sport, in a good way, and actually kind of brought to mind the hog roasts of my childhood, minus the beer.  The only exception was my little host brother Mohammad who spent most of the day staring off into space.  Luckily, my host mom had a simple explanation: “Oh, he’s just reflecting on the murders.”  She insisted that this year, Mohammad grasped that he watched four goats die a bloody death.  She may have been right. 

Mohammad, traumatized.  Bigue, age 5, is clearly used to this whole Tabaski thing by now. Also, I hope everyone likes my "working Senegalese woman's outfit" and blood-smeared forehead.

Anyway, so Tabaski was great.  I woke up Monday morning, three days after Tabaski, crawled out of my mosquito net, and pushed open to the door to my bathroom.  And that -- that’s when I saw them.

Maggots.  Hundreds and hundreds of maggots. 

Covering the floor of my shower.  Crawling down the walls.  Squirming and shaking all over my shampoo bottles, my toothbrush, my toothpaste.  Inside my soap.  Around my razor.  Collectively, all of their movements were so spastic that I thought I might just be experiencing a rush of blood to the head, like seeing stars, maggot-shaped stars.  Over the past year and a half, I have seen three cockroaches in that bathroom.  I had never seen one maggot. 

But no, this was real.  And they were actually physically everywhere.  Everywhere.  It was like a Hitchcock movie. 

Obviously, I took no photos of the maggots because I was frozen in the clutches of insanity.  If you want some good comparisons, I’m sure you could google “maggot images” and begin to imagine my life. 

I backed away from the bathroom and practically fell down trying to escape my house.  I grabbed the first host sister I saw and managed to express my wish for her to follow me.  She was skeptical, as the entire family is, of my fears.  A few weeks earlier, I had stepped on what I still contend was a snake, though they said “It was just a really huge fast moving black worm that must have crawled out of the toilet, we have them in our house all the time.”  That incident had involved me screaming a lot, and them making fun of me a lot.  So reluctantly, Mame followed me into my bathroom.

Inside, she took a look, and the expression on her face stayed steady.  “Oh,” she said.  “Insects.” 

I stared at her.  “Insects?”  I repeated.  “Insects?  I KNOW they are insects!  What are they doing here?  WHY?  I have never seen this insect before!  WHAT ARE THESE?” 

She started sweeping them up with her broom, vainly trying to get them into the dustpan before they’d, literally, worm their way out.  “Hmm,” she mused.  “Maybe because of the sheep we are drying on your roof?”

Hmm.  Maybe because of the DEAD SHEEP SITTING ON THE ROOF OF MY BATHROOM?  You think?  YOU THINK??? 

“Oh.  Yes.  That makes sense,” I replied, trying to match her level of calm.  Not understanding why all of the dead sheep were ON THE ROOF OF MY BATHROOM. 

“Yes, the dead sheep,” she replied.  “Well, just keep sweeping them out.”

And then, taking a great deal of maggots in her dustpan, Mame left me to my bathroom, and the maggots that were continuing to creep through the walls, down my drain, and congregate under any solitary object.  Every time I lifted up anything, I’d find a new club of maggots had already formed beneath.  Over the course of the day, I swept about six or seven times until my host mom finally told me that they’d removed the dead animals from my roof.  Eventually, I poured an entire jar of bleach all over my bathroom. I did feel lucky that the maggots had favored that locale instead of my bedroom. 

But even after the bleaching, something was still off.  For one, dead maggots kept appearing in the bathroom.  Did you know that when a white maggot dies, it turns black and resembles lizard poop?  I learned a lot of things.  But worse than the sight of dead maggots was the smell that permeated my room for days.  I didn’t know if the smell was dead maggots in my drains or weird pieces of sheep meat lingering in secret places or, in my worst nightmares, beagle-sized rats rotting in unrelated incidents under my bookcase.  Sometimes it was hard to breathe.  I tried to ignore it.

And then, when I awoke on Friday morning and started my usual routine of laying in my bed for awhile, I look outside of my mosquito net to see it covered in gigantic bot flies.  Thanks to Emily Kraus, a former PCV and bug expert, I had learned all about the different kinds of flies a few months ago.  And these were the giant, nasty flies that feed on rotting carcasses.  My room was full of them.  Apparently, the maggots who had survived the sweeping-bleaching-angry Lisa epidemic had finally hatched.  And clearly, they were the most reproductively fit, which translated into grotesquely big bodies, wings, eyes, and a penchant for blood.  Again, boo to animals.

Flies are hard to kill.  But luckily, I was headed out for the weekend, so I only had to deal with them for a few hours.  When I left, my little house was in quite a sorry state, smelling like a combination of poop, dead animals, and rotting cheese while also covered in flies.  I figured that when I returned in two days, one of two things would happen: everything would be miraculously dead and better, or everything would be miraculously alive and worse.  One of my friends added a third possibility that involved Jeff Goldblum crouched on my toilet, waiting for me to come home.

Luckily, I returned from my weekend to find all of the flies not only dead, but gone (surely a testament to my gecko population), and the smell mysteriously dissipated.  A Tabaski miracle! 

So now, the maggots and their adult selves are a thing of the past, but I still do live in fear.   On the other hand, this elevated experience of terror really has made other things pale in comparison.  For instance, the cockroach that creeps into my bed every night really does seem like a harmless puppy compared to a cult of maggots watching me bathe.  For this, I am thankful.  Ultimately, I’m looking forward to erasing these memories with new, upcoming holidays, like Tamharit and Thanksgiving and Christmas and President’s Day, and hoping that they don’t inspire lingering ghosts of dead animals to come and take vengeance on me days later.