On the back of a moto you can see the most fantastic sights in Cameroon. You can see breathtaking mountains, or children laughing while washing clothes in a stream, or mamas selling potatoes by the roadside with eyes that have seen a century’s worth of travelers. On the back of a moto you can find peace. Sometimes the back of a moto is exactly what I need.
So I’d been thinking of writing a blog post about my struggles with roaches, and then as I began writing discovered I couldn’t actually write about roaches without swearing at least every other sentence, and decided that maybe this wasn’t one for my official blog. But I still had lots of fun writing it (even if I didn’t have lots of fun living out this experience) so we’re gonna post it on tumblr instead.
Ok right folks, buckle in and prepare yourselves for the epic adventures of HICCUP AND THE COCKROACHES. This bedtime story is going to be mostly pretty gross and inconsistent and laden with expletives so LET’S DO THIS
So I know all you Texans and New Yorkers and People-Who-Live-In-Humid-Climate-ers are going “bro everyone gets cockroaches you just hate them and deal with it” and while I grew up in New York, I have spent a lot of my life in Utah, where it is too dry and too cold and too high for anything other than box elder bugs, so I am NOT ACCUSTOMED TO ROACHES. When I first came to Cameroon, I found roaches kind of interesting. Like, hey, check out this fucking huge beetle thing, that’s kind of nifty. And then I moved into my own home and watched them scatter every time I went to the latrine in the middle of the night, and I was like ok maybe these aren’t so great, I kind of don’t like roaches. And then they invaded my kitchen and living room at my first house and I was like ok so I kind of REALLY HATE ROACHES more than pretty much every living thing in my house, and I have seen some shit in this house so that is saying a lot. And then there was that time where I sprayed bug spray at a scorpion and roaches started DESCENDING FROM THE CEILING LIKE A BIBLICAL PLAGUE and as I stood in the middle of my kitchen clutching my can of illegal-in-the-States bug spray in one hand and a shoe in the other, jumping at every sound, I accepted that I am probably, definitely irrationally afraid of roaches. And before you say, “But Hic! You’ve had spiders and scorpions and snakes and lizards and acid spitting beetles and mice and every other manner of creepy crawly in your house, why the fuck are you afraid of roaches, that do literally nothing to harm you?” To which my response is, look I never said this was a RATIONAL fear man there is a reason I put the word IRRATIONALLY in front of the word afraid up there.
For all you Texans and New Yorkers and People-Who-Live-In-Humid-Climate-ers, I don’t actually have any idea how many roaches you might find in your apartments on any given day. Like, two? Is that high? Is it like five a week? 12 a week? I don’t know man I am completely guessing, somebody give me these statistics. ANYWAY I live in a house with a latrine. Do you know what you find in latrines, other than poop and spiderwebs? If you guessed roaches, you are COMPLETELY CORRECT. So my latrine is connected to my house, which means that my house is a horror show most of the time. As far as I can tell, they also live in my ceiling, and possibly in or near a wall in my kitchen so my house is like Roach City. This is NOT AN IDEAL SITUATION if you have an irrational roach phobia.
I went home to visit my family over the hols this year, and while I was home I paid a visit to this farm supply store, on the lookout for cat supplies for my obnoxiously fertile and flea-prone cat. While I was there, I came across an aisle of — you guessed it, you smarty you — farm grade pesticides. I never thought I could fall in love with what amounts to 32 ounces of chemicals in a bottle but here we are. So I snuck this stuff into the country wrapped in like 12 layers of plastic bags and made it all the way to my house with no incident. In case I was having second thoughts, I was greeted at my home by a LITERAL BUCKET FULL OF ROACHES in my latrine — like, awesome, it’s a good thing I don’t have to pee right now because I am NEVER ENTERING THIS LATRINE AGAIN. That was a lie, actually, I did have to pee but fuck it if I was going to enter that latrine in the dark so I held it til the next morning and had one of the most terrifying pees of my entire life. But it hardened my resolve and so that morning, Operation: EXTERMINATE began.
11: 57am. Operation: EXTERMINATE begins with me mixing up POISONOUS TOXINS next to the horror bucket in the latrine. It’s like one of those scenes in the movies where the people are trying to steal shit or whatever without waking up the dragon. The dragon, in this case, is a bucket of roaches.
Of course as I’m mixing this shit up a kitten just HAPPENS TO WANDER IN. Like fuck kitten you have no sense of self-preservation THIS SHIT COULD KILL YOU
Anyways I realise that I should actually clean out the latrine before I go spraying this magical death sauce on top of three inches of dust but in order to do that I have to ELIMINATE THE HORROR BUCKET. So I go into bugspray the shit out of it only to find that my first canister of moon tiger (this bug spray that definitely does not meet FDA approval and will probably give me 12 kinds of cancer) is basically empty, so now not only are they not dead but all MAD AS HELL (and by mad I mean that probably they’re just really panicked but EITHER WAY they’re trying to escape this bucket). I locked the door behind me so I could go get my other almost-empty canister and then returned to the roaches just milling about the bucket so I SPRAY THE SHIT OUT OF THEM and now I’m letting them stew in bug spray for a while and hoping they’ll die or eat each other sometime in the next ten minutes.
12:39pm. I HAVE SPRAYED THE DEATHSAUCE. I poked a hole in the lid of a Top bottle which sounds like an adequate substitute for a professional sprayer if you ask me. So I squirted this stuff around the walls and the floor of my latrine because there is a LOT OF IT and I just realised that that’s probably because it’s meant for a much larger house and not necessarily because you’re supposed to lay it on really thick but uh I guess my latrine really will be a death trap. I couldn’t get it very high on the walls because 1. I am very short 2. holes in the lids of water bottles aren’t actually QUITE as easy to aim as one of those fancy pesticide sprayers and 3. as much as I want to get rid of roaches I don’t really want a face full of pesticide. Like I’ve accepted that it’ll get on my hands and feet because HOW COULD IT NOT but face? eehhh…
Anyway now we wait to see what happens I guess? I’m gonna spray my kitchen later tonight when the kittens are nice and locked outside. I’m a little hesitant to do my room, because I don’t really want roaches falling and dying on my mosquito net? I might hit under the beds and stuff and just skip the walls.
So basically all that’s left to do is watch them DIE TERRIBLE DEATHS.
I don’t know if they’re actually terrible deaths, they might just die normal deaths.
But die nonetheless.
And also hope that my cats don’t die too.
1:30pm. Like, I rinsed my foot off but it’s still kind of itch and tingly, that’s fine right? It’s either pesticide or residual itchiness from my cat attacking it, unclear.
But if I have to sacrifice my foot for the greater goal of getting rid of roaches, then it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
2:48pm. Operation: EXTERMINATE update: So when I bought this stuff I specifically asked if it was a repellent, aka if I spray this shit on my walls with I have an army of roaches exploding from the walls seeking vengeance like the last two times I sprayed my walls/latrine, and he was like nope definitely not! Which means that there are three possible explanations for the 10+ roaches I’ve seen in the past hour: 1., he was lying out of his ass to get me to buy this stuff; 2., he has a very small roach population so whenever he uses it they al come out but he doesn’t notice it, and therefore doesn’t know any better; or 3., my roaches have decided that being nocturnal really just isn’t for them and they’d rather just chill with me in the daytime.
Basically what I’m saying is that I just sprayed my bedroom because fuck it if I’m going to risk bringing them all out at night, and that this shit had better kill them really fucking fast or I’m going to be partying it up with a shit ton of roaches tonight because the universe apparently hates me.
8:59am. Well, after an only MILDLY HORRIFYING night, I found a total of 32 dead roaches littered throughout my house. Good job, pesticide! 32 down, probably 999,468 to go!
Update: Well, three weeks later, I’ve completely forgotten that I wrote this, BUT I’ve probably swept about 100 roaches out of my house and only two roaches have climbed up my mosquito net in the past two weeks, so we’re calling Operation: EXTERMINATE a success! Go team!
