Since arriving in Ayolas two weeks ago, I have been living in the house of a first grade teacher named Marite and her son Carlos. The three of us spent almost a week together sharing stories about life in the USA and in Paraguay when I first arrived. (Side note- Marite thinks Obama is gorgeous. Love her!) However, last week I said goodbye to Marite and Carlos as they headed off to her parents home for the holidays and most of January. She graciously is allowing me to stay in her house while she is away. So everyday I have had the comfort of making my own breakfast and dinner, and deciding more of less what I want to do for the day…drink terere with this neighbor, go to the grocery store, nap, read a book, etc. I do go over to neighbor’s house everyday for lunch to ensure that I am practicing my language and to hear what is happening in the community.
So everything was going along splendidly- spent my first Christmas in Paraguay, started meeting more of my neighbors, increased my Spanish vocabulary by reading Harry Potter in Spanish and have been playing a lot of guitar. However, there was one thing starting to ruin my comfy living situation. Every night I increasing became more and more frightened of the number of cockroaches in the house. They started coming up through the shower drain in the bathroom and floor cracks in the kitchen when it was still light outside. When Marite was still in the house I had seen a few of cockroaches in the bathroom, but not regularly. However, when she left I was unaware of exactly what to do to keep these disgusting bugs out of the house. The more I started seeing them crawling around the house, the more I knew I needed to do something. I asked a neighbor woman about the problem, she said that mopping the floor with bleach would help and using some form of a spray. After one more night of watching them crawl over the counters in the kitchen and the toothbrushes in the bathroom, I knew I needed to attack back.
The next day I woke up early and went to the grocery for some liquid bleach and roach spray. I was enticed by the Mata Rapido-Mata Cucarachas y Hormigas green bottle and decided to give it a try later that day. I waited until siesta time after lunch to begin my attack. I began in the kitchen spraying into the large floor crack where I had seen the roaches coming and going from. I then continued to spray around the kitchen appliances and in the corners. Fully satisfied with the work, and a little overwhelmed by the fumes, I decided to move onto the bathroom. In the bathroom I sprayed start down into their layer, the shower floor, where I had seen them escaping from the night before. After a few more sprays in the bathroom I felt satisfied with my work and decided to begin mopping the floors with bleach water. As I returned the kitchen with bucket in hand I saw at least 20 cockroaches swarming the kitchen floor trying to escape into the living room. I quickly grabbed my trusty plastic flip flop off my right foot and began smashing the fleeing roaches. One, two, three……fourteen, fifteen…thirty…As I realized that the dead roach count was adding up to around 40, I remembered the bathroom.
I ran to the bathroom with one shoe in hand arriving to the scene of over a hundred cockroaches climbing up out of the shower drain and escaping into the hallway and my bedroom! Quickly my total of smashed bugs around my feet numbered 50. And that is not included the previously killed roaches. They were crawling up the door frame trying to escape. One started crawling up my left leg and I smashed the roach with my sandal on my shorts, leaving a slimy stain. Another fell from the wall above and landed in my hair. After a momentary complete body freak out I swatted the bug onto the floor and triumphantly stamped down my left foot on its stiff shelled body. This was getting out of control. I slammed the bathroom door closed and ran back towards the kitchen. There I saw that they now were escaping into the living room. With no one around to ask for help, I ran to my phone sitting on the couch and called my volunteer friend Brenda.
The moment she picked up a screamed “AYUDAME!” (help me!). After I shared a quick recap about the swarming cockroaches in my house, she told me to go get my neighbor across the street for help. She is so smart. I threw down my phone and ran for the front gate. I tried to appear somewhat calmed as I walked across the street and clapped outside of their gate. (Paraguayans don’t have doorbells; you stand in front of their house clapping your hands to get permission to come in their yard.) The 8 year old daughter came to the window and I asked to speak to one of her parents. Luckily the dad, Nelson, came to the door a few seconds later and I struggled in broken Spanish to explain my problem. “Yo tengo mucha cucarachas en mi casa ahora. Yo necesito ayuda. Por favor.” He turned back into the house to grab his trusty baseball cap with an image of Jesus on it and walked with me across the street.
I tried to explain that there were a lot of cockroaches in the house right now, but I don’t think he really understood how many there were until he walked towards the kitchen. The first word out of his mouth was “impresionante”, a proper way of saying “holy shit!” in Spanish. He then opened the door to the bathroom and quickly closed it. He told me to wait outside for about an hour and that he would return to check up on the situation.
I sat outside in the patio area for the next hour calling my volunteer friends retelling my roach story for the next hour. Nelson then returned with his daughter to see how things were in the house. The floors throughout the house were littered with the dead carcasses of roaches. The spray had attacked their nervous systems and was causing them to run from their tunnels under the house into the open air. Nelson then helped me sweep up the thousands of roaches that littered the ground throughout the house and gave me advice as to how to clean up with bleach water afterwards. Nelson’s wife also came over and showed me where to put small pools of bleach water around doorways to keep them out of my room in the future. After a general sweep of the house Nelson and his family left me to continue cleaning up the remnants of the massacre.
Yes those are all dead cockroaches just in the bathroom. And that is one on the toilet seat.
I found dead roaches everywhere; under my bed, in the toilet, on kitchen chairs, etc. I bleached the floors throughout the house like nobodies business for the next few hours. I then fled the house to the internet cyber down the street to get some fresh air and to allow the fumes to mitigate. Throughout the remaining hours of the day a few roaches would randomly appear dead in the middle of the hallway or the kitchen. The stragglers I called them. That night when I got ready for bed I had no fears of seeing any live roaches in the house. That was one of my best nights of sleep in Paraguay thus far!
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