Spiders and Cricket Roaches

...and ants, and silver fish, and flies, and unidentifiable critters...and BATS!

I cannot say enough how sick and tired I am of going on bug killing sprees before I get ready to go to bed!  I wake up to critters, come home to critters, and it seems as if each night I've been cooking dinner...FOR CRITTERS!  It's like they know I'm afraid of them and they keep coming back just to mess with my psyche!  The spiders are...HUGE! They scale my walls each night in search of a meal, I'm assuming.  I've given up on trying to kill them all because for one, they move faster than the speed of light and I'm 100% uninterested in having one chase me around the house in an attempt to seek revenge on me for trying to kill it or its brother.  The cricket roaches... (yes, cricket roaches!) I don't know how or why a cricket and a roach would have ever thought that it was okay to mate, but these ginormous crickets with roach legs and the inability to jump very high or far are DISGUSTING!  I feel like as soon as I kill one, three more find their way into my house!  Every night, after killing about 6 or 7 of these little monsters, I finally give up and retreat to the safety of my mosquito net, making sure to tuck every loose piece of the net underneath my mattress so that I am not attacked in the middle of the night and awoken from my dreamless slumber. 

When I first moved in, I thought to myself, I can do this...it's not so bad.  But as the days and nights come and go...and the bugs only seem to be getting worse, I'm not so sure.  If it were only spiders and cricket roaches, it wouldn't be so bad. But to add to this living nightmare, I have an infestation of ants both inside and outside of my house.  And these are no ordinary ants.  They are super ants!  These HUMONGOUSLY SUPER SIZED ants (compared to the ants in America) can swim, they DO NOT sleep, and they DO NOT die!  I don't care how many times you step on these things or how many ways you try to squish them...they somehow still manage to squirm and run away with not much more than a hurt leg or broken antennae.  On top of these are silver fish, which just so happen to always find their way into my fresh veggies even though the veggies are kept in tupple ware and the tupple ware is in plastic containers.  This is a double barrier so can someone please tell me how in the heck these things are finding their way into my food??!

And now the flies...

All I will say is that they are EVERYWHERE and I'm starting to believe they were put on this Earth just to make my Peace Corps latrine experience a LIVING HELL!  I can't forget to mention the millions (that's what it seems like) of unidentifiable critters that squiggle and squirm along my floor, walls, ceiling, and try to fall on me from the ceiling as my welcome home each day after work.  My greatest fear in Rwanda so far??  COMING HOME!  I'm always a little apprehensive to open my door because I'm not sure what might be waiting for me on the other side!

Love and Peace Corps,

Dametreea

P.S. The bat I mentioned in the title of this post wasn't in my house (Thank God!)  One of my volunteer friends had the bat in his house.  With that being said, I think I'm in a much better place than he is right now...at least the bugs can't give me rabies if they decide to bite. 

(Written on 7/25/12 at 8:44p)