The Demise of Sheep (Huzzah) and Rats (Booyah!)

Seems to me that all of Senegal is in a frenzy. Tabaski is Tuesday (or Wednesday, for those who celebrated Korite on Oct. 2nd) and is only the biggest holiday here. It’s sort of like Christmas I think, not theologically, but otherwise. It sort of has it’s own season… people have been asking me for over a week already how my preparations are going. My general response is, I’m always ready for a party, and their returned laughter is appropriate. What they mean about preparations is not just the food (holy cow, there were SO many people in the market today), but the rest of it too. Traditionally, you get a new complet (outfit), new shoes, new hair… no, not kidding… my sister, one of the best at hairdressing in my village, has been braiding people’s weaves for a solid 3 days. Spirits in general are up. Teachers in Velingara finally got paid yesterday and today, so there’s still time for them to buy their sheep and clothes and hair. They’ve all gone to be with their families. Some people get a little down around the holidays, especially those who can’t afford new clothes, etc. Crime is up and requests for money are too.

Tabaski is the celebration of what I believe in Jewish tradition is the Akedah? It’s when Abraham took his son to the mountain to sacrifice him and the son was spared and God provided a ram to stand in his place. Judeo-christian belief is that it was Isaac. Muslims tell the story with Ishmael. To each his own, literally. So each family has appointed at least one person to be responsible for sacrificing a sheep on Tabaski. They’ll fast until after the prayer service and then they’ll slaughter the sheep and we’ll eat meat all day long. I’m planning on being in the teacher’s compound after the prayer service and so I’ll probably eat two big meals. I have mixed feelings about that. I love being in the teacher’s compound and the school director’s family is like my second family here. Nima, the director’s wife, is an excellent cook, so I’m sure we’ll have a good meal. But I’m worried about so much meat and they way they cook it. Not so much about the cleanliness of it… it’ll be fresh, obviously, and well-cooked, so theoretically disease-free… but I’m not a huge fan of the way it’s generally prepared, at least in my house. It’ll be put in “sauce”, a combination of mostly oil, some tomato paste, onions, pepper, garlic, bouillon (because what would Senegalese cooking be without Maggi or Jumbo?), macaroni noodles, and potatoes, served over rice. There is also the likelihood that since I eat with the women in my compound, we’ll be eating organ meat, which never I have been scheming a little as to the appropriateness and feasibility of convincing them to put the meat in chili, or spaghetti, or some other kind of “sauce” that’s easy to make in large quantity. I think I’ve more or less decided to let it go, at least for this year.

EE club didn’t happen, au cause du greves. Because of the strikes, I couldn’t get the list of students from my teachers in order to get them all together for the club. So as it stands, the meeting is tentatively next Friday. School is meant to start Thursday and we’ll notify students then. Intro to Environment 101, is scheduled for Friday afternoon, si Allah jabi (if God wills it). Oh please, oh please, Allah, please jabi!

I’m in Velingara today, hanging out with Laura, one of my neighbors, and really enjoying it. I always like being with Laura because she helps me see how the intangible parts of my job are actually useful. It’s good to have friends whose presence is like a pat on the back. We’ve just been talking about my animal issues: frogs, snakes, lizards, and confirmed as of this week: a rat. There exists here something known to volunteers as the cat-rat. That is, a rat roughly the size of a normal house cat. PRAISE THE LORD, the rat I’m dealing with is not a cat-rat! This is your everyday, run-of-the-mill, six-inch long rat. But, unlike your average rat, this one is living with my hut. I do reasonably well with most creepy-crawlies. I kept a cool head about the snake. I live comfortably with the lizards and toads. I DON’T DO RATS. I just don’t. Of late, the night rustlings in my roof have peaked, and I’m losing sleep due to the sound of straw and creepy little claws. Earlier this week I was up reading and eating Dumdums. I left 2 Dumdums sticks on my chair (free-standing, isolated, in the middle of my room). I woke up in the morning, not refreshed because I had been up at least a couple of hours trying to find the source of the rustling with my flashlight, to find the very two Dumdums sticks ON TOP OF my mosquito net. My thoughts: 1. WHAT THE HECK!!! 2. must be lizards, because there’s nothing on the chair for a mouse to scale. 3. On my net?!?! There’s a tarp over my net to keep stuff from falling from the ceiling and it extends beyond the net in all directions. Conclusion: lizards must have been running along the string that runs across my room to suspend my net. After presenting the facts to my dad, his take is that it’s mice/rats (not sure which the pulaar word refers to) and that we can get poison on Sunday at the lumo.

Later that night… I awoke to the sound of rustling and again played flashlight tag with the roof. I heard the spoon fall out of the windowsill where I’d set it earlier, to dry after dinner. Instead of the usual vain search or even the occasional “I see the straw moving, but can’t see what’s moving it”, I had the culprit dead in my lampbeam. There he was, looking so much like the hamburgler, with one of my precious home-grown tomatoes in his mouth. That little punk! And since I was anticipating a mouse (post-conversation with my hostdad), I was a little startled to find a full-grown rat co-habiting my hut. Mentally I’m a little freaked, but then again, he’s running around the top of the walls and I’m safely in my mosquito net. I didn’t sleep too much after that until morning, when I knew the rat had gone to bed. But now Sunday loomed as a day of salvation. I am definitely going to the lumo to buy poison and I don’t feel the least bit bad about killing the thing.

That was Thursday night. Three nights didn’t seem too much to handle sleeping knowing there’s a rat in my room. Rationally, I know that nothing has changed bar my own consciousness of the situation, but still, there’s a certain amount of urgency I feel in ridding my hut of the beast. Last night only heightened that urgency… about a thousand-fold. It was the coldest night we’ve had. I slept in my fleece, with socks on (I almost never sleep with socks on), covered by my sarong, my sheet doubled over, the thin sheet I use for a bed-covering, and my towel on top of that, just to keep warm. I’m kicking myself for not having brought a blanket, or having bought one here yet. Around 4.00, the rustling again. Fine. We know how this goes down: you rustle, I wake up, shiver with the thought that you’re running rampant in my room and there’s nothing I can do about it, one of us finally drifts off to sleep, and eventually we face another day. I might spotlight you with my flashlight, but do I really want to see you invading my space? No, that’ll only encourage nightmares. Try to sleep, try to sleep, easy, easy… I woke up again to more rustling. Then I felt something. My stomach is turning over now just writing about it, knowing what’s about to happen. I felt it through the wood of my bed, something was touching the bed somewhere. Ok, ok, it’s ok. You’re just feeling things. Go to sleep… WHAT THE HECK!!!!!!! I FELT IT ON MY FOOT!!!!! I jolted up and curled my feet away from the net. I’m sure I kicked it off the net, but OMG the dirty, nasty, home-invading rat just crawled over my foot. (I know, I know, it was on the outside of the net, but still… that is mine. You don’t get to be all up on my mosquito net.) The next half-hour (it was probably only like 2 minutes, but it felt like a long time) was the battle for the room. I’m having a hard time remembering how it all happened. I know that I was in my net for part of it and out of my net for part of it. I remember clapping and trash-talking the rat to keep it away from my bed. I remember watching (from within the net) the rat try to climb up the doorframe to get into the roof and fall to the floor. (“Ha! Whatcha gonna do now, fool?”) I believe at that point it climbed my bike and jumped from there onto my net again (Not having it!) and I shook the net to get it to fall off. I think I could have set an Olympic record with the time it took me to jump out of my bed (net and all) and grab my broom. I opened the back door to give the rat an escape (because I knew there was no way I was going to kill it tonight and I didn’t want to risk being bitten). And there was a certain amount of me trying to coerce the rat with my flashlight beam from across the room, armed with my broom in the other hand. I don’t know what I’d have done with the broom. It’s a Senegalese broom (read, a collection of straw tied together, about 18 inches long at best), already in a sad state and needing to be replaced. At some point, the rustling stopped and I felt safe enough to go back to sleep (door still open, snakes and toads welcome!). So today, a “necessity item” on my list is rat poison. Fool must die! (said the Peace Corps volunteer). I think I’m going to try and sleep somewhere else tonight, maybe in someone else’s hut, while I wait for the poison to work it’s magic. It’s too cold to sleep outside and I am not having World War 3 again. Ah! my skin is crawling. I don’t do rats. I don’t. And this one is about to find out just how much “homey don’t play”.