It’s like the Discovery Channel. Live. In your house.

~A story about one Peace Corps Volunteer and the country she lives in, summarized in one filled/overly demonstrative/ideal night.

She comes home, happy to see her door still cracked open. She misplaced her key the day before and has been keeping it open just enough so that the lock wont click, although the past couple times she’s come back, the door has been closed and she’s been locked out. It was closed by a neighbor with good intentions no doubt, but it didn’t help. “I gotta find those keys,” she says to herself.

She half limps into the house, walking gingerly due to a splinter on the bottom of her foot – a result of chasing horses out of the fenced yard of the CH… barefoot… in the dark. She may or may not have stepped in horse poop in the process (she didn’t check, just rubbed her feet in the grass and moved on, in hot pursuit). She’s grown accustomed to looking out for CH as well as her house now, and she’s felt a real ownership and competency with both places. It wasn’t many months ago that she was fearful of all the moving things that crawled in and out of her house, or that she imagined crawled in and around her house. Not now, though.

Lights on and getting tweezers are her first priorities. Her torch light however, catches one, and then another huge cockroach loitering in the front room and kitchen. With the second roach, she begins to feel the house slipping from her possession, as well as her perception of the static nature of things. The Invasion of Nature; action is required. She starts to search for the bug killer spray, but can’t find it. Her crank operated torchlight dims down and she goes to light one of her lanterns. As she goes to put the glass cover back on after lighting the wick, it slips and falls to the floor with a resounding crash. She sighs and moves on.

Further search for bug killer unearths a moving THING on a pile of clothes on the couch. A snake. Not feeling as bad ass as the LAST time a snake was in her house, she makes a few futile attempts to pick it up and only succeeds in getting it to crawl into a crack in the wall. Further searches for spray and now the snake, and this unearths the misplaced keys - in a corner behind a door. It all comes back to her – she’d thrown the keys back there in an infuriated effort to stop the maddening banter of the bats living within the walls the day before. It hadn’t worked.

One down… five to go, she tells herself, figuring light, splinter, roach #1, roach #2 and snake were the next tasks at hand. She hears a couple noises as she starts up the search anew for the snake or bug spray, whichever came first. One sound coming from the trash can, another in the bathroom where she guessed the snake slithered off to. She’s feeling surprisingly skittish, but recognizes she’s doing loads better at these sorts of “house wars” than at the start of her service. She picks through her trash and finds a cricket and leaves it be, the least of her worries. The noise in the bathroom? Oh, it’s the sound of the leaking sink pipe dripping into a bucket. It had been leaking since the day before. When she had tried to stop the leak, the entire tube broke free from the sink and she had turned the pipes off, but not before being sprayed by water. The pipes still leaked. “Gotta get someone to check the pipes out,” she tells herself.

Turns out, the snake WAS in the bathroom, shyly hanging out in the open crevice behind the shower. It wasn’t reluctant to come out and she wasn’t reluctant to put her hand in, not with it’s mouth and fangs facing her way. Roach #1 re-appeared finally and, in a flash of insight, she retraced her steps to her last insect encounter (a trail of ants on the shelves in the kitchen) and found the spray right where she left it. “Ok roach, prepare for liquidation,” she says, no qualms about execution, gas chamber style, though she still hasn’t been able to bring herself to squash bugs yet - which would have made things much easier, she admits to herself. She lines up the shot, presses the button and… nothing. She forgot that that brand new bottle she’d bought in town wouldn’t spray for some reason.

Pausing to crank her torchlight, she grabs a broom and compromises – death by squishing… by a broom. In two or three whammies, the roach is juicing up the floor and she flicks it outside with a couple twists of the wrist. She then finds the time to pluck out the splinter and then sweep the broken glass into a pile before she lights her other lantern and goes to check on the snake again. Not only is the snake out of the crevice enough to grab, but cockroach #2 is right in the line of fire, a convenient diversion. She decides to go for the big potatoes (i.e. the snake. Even though she’s fascinated by them, she’ll have a harder time sleeping knowing one is silently by slithering around in her house). The snake pops back into the crevice, though, when she’s AGAIN too skittish to keep hold of it. Taking her frustrations out on roach #2 was no problem and she ferociously annihilated it and swept it outside promptly. Ok, 5 down, 1 to go.

Deciding it was time for Defcom 5, she goes for a forked branch to use on the snake and she fashions a makeshift headlight out of a headband and her wind up torchlight (noting wryly she’d used the headband to construct a makeshift safety glove for the last snake she caught. The Y to pin down the snake behind its head to safely grasp it, the "headlight" for an easier hands-free approach at the attack. The Y was too big, the snake retreats. She waits again for an opportune moment. The headlight fell off. She waits again for an opportune moment. She talks to the snake. “I’m not gonna hurt you, I just want you out of my house. YOU want to get out, I want you out. C’mon, c’mon!” The Y was still too big. The snake slithers into a cupboard. Another attempt. The snake slithers into a crack in the boards.

In chasing the snake around the house, she finds all sorts of proofs of life within. Poop from all sorts of things, cobwebs, dead and alive spiders. Hmm. Sleep finally overrides all other supercharged senses and though she vowed not to go to sleep until she carried that snake outside, she gives in. Tucking her mosquito net securely in at all sides of the bed, she falls asleep, queen of the castle… surrounded by her loyal subjects… or squatters, however you choose to look at it.

She’s never alone. Things are never still. It’s never quiet. Never predictable. Oh Guyana.