I went out to dinner with a friend this week and she was complaining about crickets in her house. Crickets! Who is terrified of crickets? I laughed and regaled her with my Peace Corps horror stories. In Mozambique, not a day went by without at least one encounter with a creepy critter: spiders, ants, wasps, geckos, snails, cockroaches, scorpions, bats, rats, you name it.
"I would have left Africa immediately," she replies, and I try to convince her that it wasn't that bad. Honestly, it wasn't. It was just a part of life.
But then I see the tiny 8-legged guy in my kitchen sink and for some reason, it really disturbs me. I guess things like that are contextually out of place in America. I don't live in a reed house with a tin roof anymore, I don't have to sleep under a mosquito net, I don't have to be completely independent and self-sufficient. If I there were a rat scuttling around in my house here, I'm not sure I could just pick up a broom and beat it to death, and then go back to sleep. I don't think I could just poke the bat hanging in the corner of my kitchen, until it crawled back into the hole it came from. I probably wouldn't crawl under the bed to chase down a white camel spider the size of my hand.
In a lot of ways, African Viv is so different from American Viv. How do I reconcile the two?
Missing person's in the window / Staring at me / Saying things I can't hear / A missing person's in the window / Staring at me / Haven't seen them in years - Onerepublic
0 comments:
Post a Comment