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Published: January 14th 2009
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two entries here, from the 12th and today, the 14th.
12 Jan 2009
Monday
10:10 pm
Well. Walked to San Lucas this morning and caught a cab to Somoto. Called Mom and surprised her at work - haha. Had a fairly uneventful morning in Somoto, though I did, predictably, run into two Health PCVs who live in the department of Madriz, too. Went to try and look at mattresses for my bed, but they were waaaay expensive where I was looking and I’m not entirely sure what size my bed is and it was a failed mission. Took a cab to San Lucas and hiked up the mountain, too.
The rest of the day after Somoto, though, has been fairly eventful. With good news and bad news.
Good news is that I created my ultimate playlist on my ipod AND I figured out how to put photos on my ipod! So now I can share much more of my life with my new Nican friends without having to bring out the computer.
Which, incidentally, I am using now late at night alone in my room.
The bad news isn’t so much bad news, but a TRAUMATIZING couple of events tonight. So Eyebrows, Mita, Angsty Fro, and Aunt J and I were sitting in the kitchen BSing. About food. About heights. Families. How I talk to 17 month Alexandra in English and what I am saying to her. How to translate phrases. How Aunt J didn’t want to answer her cell and so we were all taking turns. “Hello? No, soy una gringa. Quien quiere? J? No conozco una J, lo siento.” haha all in good fun, lots of BS, like I said.
So Mita owns a small venta and Angsty Fro kept having to leave the kitchen to go sell chupetas and cigarettes. And then she was screaming CULEEEEBRA!! or SNAAAAKE! Of course we all come running and all the boys who were hanging out smoking at the casa communal come and we get machetes and sticks of fire from the stove and everyone’s looking in the shed/chicken coop where it went and meanwhile we’re all trying to scare each other by grabbing each other’s ankles and yelling and generally being assholes and having nervous fun about something serious. So a cousin finally stabs it and drags it out back onto the porch and kills it and throws it across the road.
Good that we found it and killed it, but it still gave me the willies and as I was walking back here to our house in the dark every shadow and branch was making me jump.
So I come in and brush my teeth and pee and take out my contacts and get out my computer. And I go to hang up my sweatshirt and spread out my towel a little more so it can dry off, and what is on the wall behind my towel and my sweatshirt?
A CHAGAS BEETLE! I recognized it immediately as we were warned and warned about them and shown dead ones in glass cases during training… and immediately took my sandal off and smashed it… but it crawled on up the wall and behind the wood supports! AHHHH!!!
Let me tell you a little about the Chagas beetle and Chagas’ disease:
Pg 431, Moon Handbooks Nicaragua, Health and Safety:
“Chagas’ Disease: The Chagas bug (Trypanosoma cruzi) is a large, recognizable insect, also called the kissing bug, assassin bug, and cone-nose. In Spanish it’s known as chinche, but this word is also used for many other types of beetle-like creatures.
“The Chagas bug bites its victim (usually on the face, close to the lips), sucks its fill of blood and, for the coup de grace, defecates on the newly created wound.
“Chagas bugs are present in Nicaragua, found mostly in poor campesino structures of crumbling adobe.
“Besides the downright insult of being bitten, sucked, and pooped on, the Chagas bug’s biggest menace is the disease it carries of the same name, which manifests itself in 2%!o(MISSING)f its victims. The first symptoms include swollen glands and a fever that appear 1-2 weeks after the bite. The disease then goes into a 5-30 year remission phase. If and when it reappears, Chagas’ disease causes the lining of the heart to swell, sometimes resulting in death. There is no cure.”
So. Literally the day in August when I bought this guidebook in Missouri and read that, my family was watching the medical mystery drama, House. And someone had just died of Chagas’ Disease, and I was like, hey! I just read about that! Then, during Peace Corps training they showed us a dead Chagas bug so we’d know what to look for.
So, I come from my grandma’s house where we just killed some kind of patterned snake that may or may not have been poisonous, and now I have an effing Chagas bug on the wall behind MY TOWEL and MY SWEATSHIRT and I tried to kill it and I failed and the mosquitoes were swarming around and I was FREAKING OUT!
So I crawled into my mosquito net, my mosquitero, grabbed my phone, and went through my contacts trying to figure out who would be awake and had service in their site and would get me. And I settled on A.T. I wanted a guy. So I called AT and was like, heyhowareyoubecause I AM FREAKING OUT and need to vent this IN ENGLISH! And he was sympathetic and solid and I calmed down, wished him well as he’s in Managua, sick, again, and hung up to play with the photo option on my ipod, still totally wigged out about the Chagas beetle lurking somewhere in my room.
Then, as usual, the mosquitoes were swarming outside my mosquitero and sometimes I try and kill them from within. So I look up, and what is right above my head, 6 inches away? THE CHAGAS BEETLE! I grabbed my handkerchief, pulled down a fold in the mosquitero, and squished it. Heard it crunch, but then again I heard it crunch against the wall with my shoe earlier and it still scuttled away. Oh yeah, squished it with my hand wrapped in my handkerchief, and it still tried to crawl away across my mosquito net! So I crunched it again! STILL MOVING!!! At this point I was beyond being scared - after all the mosquitero is between me and it, and the handkerchief, I was just pissed off that I kept feeling it crunch in my hand and the damn thing wouldn’t DIE!!
After a few more crunches, it died. And I am currently looking at the deadly dead beetle lying dead a foot away from my face on the slope of my mosquitero. And it had better well still be there in the morning or I am going to FLIP OUT. Unless, of course, the ants come and carry it off.
THANK GOD FOR MY MOSQUITO NET! Or it would’ve fallen into my bed and potentially bitten me and I would have the luck of being the minority of 2%!o(MISSING)f the population who gets Chagas’ but they wouldn’t know what my symptoms meant and would probably think I had dengue fever and then suddenly in a decade my heart would swell and no one would know why and then I’d die.
MY TILES NEED TO GO NOOWWW!!!
And on that note I am going to eat some peanut butter and watch part of Ocean’s 13 that Arielle sent me and take a couple of benadryl so I can knock myself out and sleep.
ugh *shudder*
................
14 Jan 2009
Wednesday
1.40 pm
Yesterday a dad died in our community. I´d never met him, but three of his four kids come to my English classes and I know his wife. So yesterday I went with my family to the vela, or the wake, in the house. And today we walked down the mountain in a funeral procession to the cemetary in San Lucas.
And then I wanted to use the cyber in San Lucas, but it was closed, so now I´m in Somoto.
Death brings up interesting conversations. Like about being buried vs being cremated. And the difference in wakes in the States and here. And the rules that go along with cemetaries in the States, and thus the costs. And the visual difference in cemetaries in the States vs here in Nicaragua. Organ donation, again, another interesting topic.
Well, that´s about all there is to report here.
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lori jones
non-member comment
ugh
Molly---you are one brave cookie! I want you to make sure there are no holes in your mosquito netting! What a day you had. Hang in there, girl. Thinking of you in CO---love, lori