Aranha karma

Hi all!!! I´m here safe, living in Riberao Manuel on the island of Santiago with a great host family and unbelievable view. I wish I could give you all the details but I don´t have much time at this cafe. I wrote a post from underneath my mustard yellow mosquito net at my home stay, but forgot to load it on my flash drive. I have some massive updates anyway.

Basically in my post I was describing a particularly embarrassing chase around my room involving myself, a tiny bottle of bug spray and a spider that was (I truly wish I were kidding) at least the size of my hand when my fingers are spread open. I chased the beast around my room for a good half hour, until I worked up a serious sweat, and eventually had to ask my sister to come ajuda me.

I wondered, I distinctly remember, right as the shoe met the spider, if such a thing as spider karma could possibly exist. It turns out, it does!!! My following story has since been discussed on our peer support phone network, and I wasn´t even the one to call.

One definitively foreign thing about life here is how dark it gets once the sun goes down. I mean dark, dark. I can´t tell if my eyes are open or closed dark. The verdict is still out on whether the malaria pills are affecting my dreams but I´m inclined so far to say that they are, which makes the process of going to sleep a little strange.

So, this particular night I woke up at probably 3 in the morning because I heard distinct scratching to my left on the wall. My bed is pressed against the wall, so this was only a foot away from me at most. I thought it was a rat, by how loud it was, until I realized that the noise was moving slowly up the wall. So I sat up quickly and turned on the light, and one of these spiders was sitting there in front of me, with only a mosquito net in between. I figured enough was enough, I needed to set some ground rules. Besides, I´m in Africa, there are creepy crawlies everywhere and I can handle this one. So I took my t-shirt, balled it up in my hand, and slammed my fist into the spider. I didn´t realize that it had a pouch of eggs on its underside, and as soon as I made contact, the one huge spider exploded into (again, I sincerely wish I were kidding) at least one to two hundred tiny spiders that started crawling around my wall. They were small enough that some of them started crawling through my mosquito net, so I grabbed my squeaky bottle of spray and kept pumping until I was out of spray. Unfortunately, I only got about 40 of them, and there was nothing left for me to do. This was the only room I could possibly sleep in, and being underneath the mosquito net was the best option I had.

I tried to sleep with the light on, but couldn´t, so eventually I had to trust that I was going to survive the night and turned the light out.

Think about that one next time you see a spider in the corner of your room.