Posh Corps

Be careful what you wish for. Since some of my friends who served in the Peace Corps refer to my service in the Eastern Caribbean as the "Posh Corps", I found myself wishing I was "roughing it" more. Enter cockroaches and water stoppage.

Now, I was deathly afraid of cockroaches before coming to Grenada. I can still hear the laughter of well-intentioned friends as they asked how I'd handle all of the exotic bugs I would encounter on a tropical island. So imagine my delight these past 8 months as I encountered few, and only dead, cockroaches. Definitely gross, but not life-threatening.

That is until Thursday. For the past week, I kept seeing this one cockroach in my house hiding in cabinets and under objects. After said tramatic events, I effectively blocked them from my memory. One night, as a large dark object crawled along the ceiling in the living room, I returned to bed, not wanting to know what it was. In the dark corners of my mind I knew it was Sr. Cucaracha. Sure enough, the next morning, there he was on my kitchen counter.

After recovering from my fear-induced paralysis, I grabbed my OFF! bug spray and created an unmerciful deet storm above him, hoping to debilitate him enough to squash him with a shoe. After an epic 3-minute battle that included Sr. Cucaracha heroically dive bombing off the kitchen counter with a sickening "sllllap!" onto the floor, I managed to squash him. Too afraid to move the shoe, I left him for about 10 minutes while brainstorming how to properly dispose of the body. During that time, no less than 1 million ants decided to cover his body. After sweeping them all up into a dust bin and tossing them outside, I started to get ready for work, attempting (unsuccessfully) to forget that morning's events.

A few glorious, cockroach-free days later I started to feel more relaxed, as evidenced by my jumping a mere 2 feet in the air everytime I saw a shadow or my cat move. Then on Monday morning while getting ready for work, I stopped to admire how adorable my cat looked while playing with some random object (he loves bottle caps). He kicked it around like a kitty soccer ball, then picked it up in his mouth. As you have no doubt suspected, it was a freaking cockroach. Apparently Sr. Cucaracha has some vengeful family members and Jasper uncovered them before they could unleash their campaign of fear.

Although gross, the cockroach was dead, so I spared my heart some unnecessary palpitations. As I went to clean up the body, the roach flipped over and started crawling at a moderate pace before turning onto his back, legs twitching in the air. He repeated this cruel resurrection several times while I hid behind some furniture, gathering my last bit of courage and a shoe. You know the rest.

Finally, as I was liming on the street waiting for a friend, a cockroach sauntered past me in the gutter and died belly-up in front of me. Steep learning curve this week.

Aaaand, yesterday I awoke to very low water pressure as I filled up a bottle and made breakfast. As I walked to work at the local secondary school, I passed hordes of primary school children walking AWAY from the schools. They told me that there was no water at the school and were therefore dismissed for the day. Sure enough, the secondary school closed by 3rd period. Looks like some neighbors and I might need to make some more trips to the river and sea this week for a bath and some washing water. That sounds more like it.