Critters in my Bed

I just got home not too long ago after what felt like a very long day. Fridays always feel like long days but this one felt extra long. Maybe it was cleaning out the office and clearing many years of rubbish from hidden cupboards, maybe it was the multitude of power outages throughout the day, maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the super-packed bus ride home that felt endless, but whatever the cause, it was a long.

By the time I got home, all I could think was “shower, shower, shower”. So I slammed my door, ran to the bathroom, jumped into the shower and stayed there for about 20 minutes. (Who knew I’d ever want to take a 20 minute cold shower, right?). So I get out of the shower, walk over to my room, go to lay my clothes on the bed and I see a tail. I freeze and I start thinking to myself, “is that a mouse tail or a lizard tail”. The tail wiggles a little bit and I decide, I’ve gotta move my sheets and figure this out. So I take a deep breath, muster up some courage, move the sheet and to my great relief a lizard takes a flying leap off of my bed and onto the floor.

After a year in Antigua, I still don’t expect to find things wriggling around my bed but I was genuinely relieved to find that it was just a lizard. And then I was pretty proud of myself for brushing the thing off the sheets and resuming my normal routine. However, if I had found a mouse in my sheets, well that would have been a completely different story.

For the past few weeks I’ve had a pretty bad mouse problem, in two days I caught four mice and I know there are more lurking around just waiting to be caught. I’ve developed a routine if I have to get out of bed in the middle of the night. I peek out of my mosquito net, grab my phone and use it as a flashlight to sweep the floor to make sure there are no critters under my feet. Then I put on a pair of slippers, and shuffle to the spare bedroom where I turn on the light and scan the floor. Once I’ve decided the spare bedroom is clear, I shuffle to the bathroom, turn on that light, and take several steps back as I wait for the critters to crawl back into their corners. I do this EVERY time I have to use the bathroom after dark, because on more than one occasion I’ve found a huge roach, a mouse, a giant frog, or some other critter lurking and waiting to surprise the heck out of me.

As I reflect back on a year of service in Antigua, obviously more than critters come to mind, but I do wonder if I’ll ever get completely over the shock of seeing something whiz past me in the middle of the night. The grey blur of a house mouse, the creepy shuffle of a cock roach, or the alien type saunter of a centipede. Will I ever get over that? Probably not.

So in other news, I haven’t updated my blog since April. I make no promises about trying to be better about blogging, I’m clearly rubbish at it. But I do have a pretty good excuse; I got sooooo busy with Camp GROW I really let go of my personal life altogether in exchange for loads and loads of work on camp. Which, by the way, was a HUGE success and there will definitely be another camp in 2012.

If you want to see pictures from camp, check out www.facebook.com/gardcenter or if you want to see our video you can see it here: