Unwelcome Visitors.

I was bracing myself for re entering my house after a long absence and having left in somewhat of a rush. But it was even worse than I imagined. There was a layer of mould growing on all the furniture and a jungle had taken over my pit latrine . If these things weren’t bad enough, later I made an even more gruesome discovery. A pile of cockroach infested dirty clothes! There began the performance of extricating the little critters But by the fiftieth critter Ellie and I had it down to a fine art. I picked up the item of clothing shook it, then Ellie armed with Bop sprayed the thing until it was dazed and confused then whoever was nearest violently stamped on it or frantically chased it around until it ran up a wall and then flattened it with a flip flop. It has to be violent because these things don’t die easily.

After about two hours in the 40 degree heat the cockroach massacre had ended and the back yard was littered with cockroach corpses with a fair amount of blood and guts.

Now I had a cockroach free house or so I thought! Two nights later I was woken up at 3.30 in the morning by a rustling sound coming from somewhere in my bedroom. It was so noisy I thought it must be a mouse so I tentatively got out from underneath my mosquito net to investigate. I shone my torch around the room to try and work out where the noise was coming from but couldn’t see anything. So I sat down on a jerry can defeated, thinking I wasn’t going to get any more sleep that night when a giant cockroach emerged from under the bed. I quickly put an end to him but kept listening because I couldn’t believe that a cockroach could make that much noise!

Thankfully the noise stopped so feeling happy that it wasn’t a mouse I crawled back under the mosquito net. Only to wake with a start an hour later. A siren was going off outside and I had incorporated this into my dream and woke up thinking I had to evacuate the house! The final straw was the call to prayer over loudspeaker an hour later. After that I gave up on the idea of sleep and watched another episode of the wire!

The joys of living in The Gambia!