Rats and Dancing

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

I’m in Diego!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

I wasn’t planning to write an entry until I got to the Diego MEVA, but there has been quite a bit of excitement around here. Two words: rats and dancing.

Let me backtrack. While everyone was in Ambanja for Thanksgiving, it seemed apparent that an unwelcome rodent-like creature had visited my room while we were all at Mama PC’s for lunch. The evidence: Jonathan’s bag of mangos had been chewed open and one of the mangos had been partially eaten. However, there was no further evidence of foul play for the next few days.

While everyone was here, a few slept at a hotel, a few at Mama Peace Corps’ house, and Jason crashed with me. On Saturday night, he and I were both woken up by the sound of little rat feet and squeaks. The sounds seemed to be coming from inside the room, but I assumed they were just up in the ceiling. Since there were no visible sightings, we went back to sleep.

Once everyone had left Ambanja, I didn’t detect any rodent evidence for three days. I slept soundly. However, when I came home Wednesday evening I opened my closet to discover that a rat had chewed through both a Ziploc bag and the thick plastic Tupperware container within to get to my flour. It had also chewed up the end of two large rolls of paper and had left the remnants of the beginning of a nest in the corner of the bottom shelf. I cleared out the nest and put the chewed broken Tupperware container in my trash bag on the floor next to my bed.

That night I was in the middle of a deep sleep when I was awoken by the sound of something going through my trash bag. I turned on my headlamp and there it was: a big, brown rat going at the Tupperware container. I only got a quick glimpse, because as soon as I turned on my headlamp, it bolted under my bed, climbed up my guitar case and up an electrical cable to escape through the ventilation holes in the wall near the ceiling. This took a matter of seconds.

I was tired and went back to sleep, but was woken up again by the sound. This time I pulled up my mosquito net and hopped out of bed as I turned on my headlamp, and jumped over to grab my broom. However, the rat was already up the wall by the time I had my hand on the handle. I went over to my closet to see if it had revisited the original scene of the crime, and whattayaknow! Another rat shot out of the doors, through my legs and up the wall to freedom. I was stunned.

I opened my door and set my garbage bag outside. I moved my guitar case and table from away from the wall, hoping to prevent (or at least discourage) future rat entry. The measures seemed to have been a success.

On Thursday I got a surprise visit from Jason and Katie who came in to town to meet with the visiting Peace Corps Health Sector Director and doctors the next day.

So, while they had meetings, I ran a few errands: I got a haircut; I purchased blank CD’s to make copies of my song recordings; I didn’t bother waiting behind the mob of people at the bank; I mailed a letter at the post office; and I spent a few hours at the Lycee printing out 350 end-of-term exams on the good old ‘90s era Laserjet printer. Busy day. I felt very proud of my accomplishments, and I met Jason and Katie who had good news of their own: they can now work at the health clinic here in Ambanja, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other over the next two years.

The three of us were in great spirits when we went over to Mama Peace Corps’ in the evening. I had been told earlier in the week that there was some type of event happening in Ambanja to welcome the new Chef CISCO. I figured it would be a meeting at someone’s house. However, Mama knew otherwise. She told me it was a big meeting with drinking and dancing, and all the teachers in Ambanja were going, including herself.

So, since that event was already on my schedule for the night, Jason and Katie decided to tag along. We walked up the main road a bit and came to a giant concrete building behind the Catholic church. We heard a speech being blasted out of loudspeakers and thunderous applause. We walked into the hall to see the Chef CISCO with a microphone on stage and hundreds of teachers sitting at tables drinking and eating picnic dinners. We were late.

Well, it’s a big deal just to see a white person walking down the street here, so you can imagine how crazy the crowd got to see three white people walk across the dance hall to our table in the middle of a Malagasy teacher’s conference/dance party.

Eventually the speech finished and the music started blaring. A few people got up and danced, but after a conga line dance, almost everyone sat down. Eventually Mama PC decided it was time to make her move. When Jerry Marcos came on she got up started dancing in the middle of the dance floor. There was only about a half dozen other people. She motioned for us to join her, expecting others to follow suit. Well, rather than starting a mass movement to the dance floor, we became a spectacle for the hundreds of teachers that remained in their seats. But it was damn fun.

The next day was set to be pretty uneventful, but I was looking forward to meeting with the director of an environment NGO in the afternoon. It turned out to be well worth the wait. The NGO is financed by Germany, but run by Malagasy staff who work directly with Malagasy communities to combat/prevent erosion caused by deforestation.

The director, Andry, is from Antananarivo, and he used to work for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). While there, he learned to speak English remarkably well, but he’d like to continue practicing. What makes him different from the dozens of people that come by wanting private English lessons at my house is that he doesn’t want private English lessons at my house. He’d like to set up an English workshop for his colleagues at their office facility.

That certainly sounds worthwhile: it’s a legitimate organization (rather than the shady men who come by wanting to learn English because they want an American girlfriend); I could teach more than one person at a time (all the people asking for private lessons can’t comprehend why it’s not ok to just teach them and exclude everyone else); and he will provide the meeting place (as opposed to knocking at my door at all hours of the day).

He took me on a tour of the facility, showing me models of techniques to prevent erosion into farmland, maps of reforestation projects, and a peanut garden planted on a special type of plant that serves as topsoil.

After the tour I interviewed him, and then we practiced English for a while. Eventually he asked if I’d like to grab a drink. I said sure, but it was getting late and I’d need to put on bug spray or else I’d get eaten alive my mosquitoes. So he waited for me while I hurried down the road to my house. I swung open my door, and who was looking back at me from on top of the wooden frame for my mosquito net? You guessed it: a big brown rat. I charged at it, but it escaped with a flying leap toward the ventilation holes in the wall. I did a sweep of the room and my closet, and there was no sign of another rat lurking about.

I was in such good spirits that it didn’t really matter. I went back to meet Andry and we grabbed fries and a beer and I answered questions about the structure of the U.S. government. When I walked back, I swung by Mama PC’s. Momyne was around, and he wanted to come over for a bit. I told him there was a very real possibility that we’d encounter a rat, so he’d better be ready.

[Warning: graphic descriptions ahead]

Sure enough, as soon as I opened the door, Mr. “I Chew On All of Josh’s Stuff” was waiting. The next few minutes were chaos. Momyne grabbed my broom, and I grabbed Dorothy’s rat killing stick. Momyne knocked the rat off the mosquito net frame. It scurried around the floor under the bed. We frantically chased it around the room, trying to flush it out from under the bed, and then the table and then my work desk. It kept going into my closet, and we’d flush it out of there, but it was just too darn quick. It would dart between our legs and back under something else. Finally, it scurried up the mosquito net frame again and Momyne knocked it onto the top of the mosquito net.

Now, there was a giant piece of plastic wrapping material on top of the mosquito net that had once been vacuum-sealed around my mattress. I kept this giant piece of plastic because I knew my roof leaked and that rainy season was coming. Things just might need to be covered by giant plastic wrapping material.

Or… a rat might need to be strangled to death with Momyne’s bare hands!

Yep, you read correctly. In a flash, Momyne grabbed the plastic around the rat and held on until the rat stopped twitching. He then hit it in the head a few times with the broom handle to make sure it was dead. Out on my front porch I stabbed it in the head with Dorothy’s rat killing stick. Twice now has it drawn rodent blood.

Quite the excitement. Things should slow down a bit now. Tomorrow and Tuesday I’ll be testing. I’ll have to grade everything before Wednesday morning, because that’s when Katie and I will be hopping on a brousse to go to Diego. I fly to Tana on Thursday for a week of In-Service Training (IST).