My house is alive. There are creatures living in the walls, on the walls, below the floor, on the ceiling, etc. Like a rain forest, my house has its own ecosystem.
First are the lizards. There once were two of them that happily lived with me. They enjoyed crawling through the hole where the tin roof meets the wall just above my doorway. One day I came home and one dead near my bed. It seems he was still in the house when I left, after locking the metal doors and windows, and suffocated. I found him splayed on the ground with his arms sticking out and his long tail extended straight behind him. Another day I came home and found a piece of rope in the door handle of my screened door. Curiously (well, stupidly), I wondered how the rope got there while I was gone and had to reach out and touch it. Imagine my surprise when part of the “rope” fell to the floor and floundered around while the rest of it crawled back of the wall towards the ceiling. Naturally, after jumping away from the door, I forgot the word for lizard and couldn't explain to my homologue what had caused me to jump. New lizards have taken the place of the original two and prefer spending their time resting during the day and crawling on top of the roof during the night. There is a special lizard, that probably isn't a lizard, that is super fat with a blue fade to green fade to yellow tail that loves crawling on my concession walls.
Then there are the termites. They have created long trails across the wooden beams that are tied to the tin roof to hold it in place. As I lay in bed, I hear the sound of pieces of dirt falling to the ground as they crawl in my house, pushing dirt out of the way as they go. They come in through the roof and they are crawling under my house, breaking up my cement floor as they go and making trails of dirt up the wall, many that were painted over and are now a permanent fixture of the house.
The giant ants (the size of termites) used to enjoy crawling in through the roof as well and go diving through the trunk I had all of my food in. It took me a few weeks of coming home to them every night to figure out what they wanted. I eventually discovered a hole in my sugar bag and discovered that they had eaten my entire can of Nescafe (big loss there, not). I bought a bucket to hold my spices and they have, for the most part, left.
The cockroaches are a recent development. Usually they just hang out in my latrine and jump out at me every night when I lift the cover of the latrine up. I stomp on them when I can and then kick them out of the hole in my latrine where my bucket bath water runs out. I typically score a hat trick every night. The cockroaches in my house seem particularly dumb. They just hang out on the wall and die. I see them at night and find them dead on their back on the floor the next morning.
I have written about the mice before so won't go into that again, other than to say that I got a new door about a month ago so they cannot crawl in the main door at all anymore. Needless to say, I really like my new door.
For a few months, I was greeted by hundreds of small flies as the sun was setting. I don't know what kind of flies they are. They aren't black- they're white. Their wings are thinner and originate at their neck instead of their sides. They reproduce in holes in the exterior walls. It seems that they crawl in my window as the sun sets because they like that the inside of my house is darker than the outside. So they crawl through the screen and then just crawl up and down the screen of the window. I don't really understand. Hundreds of them crawl around at each window. It is the only time I hate having so many windows in my house. The only time.
Of course there are spiders too. Compared to other volunteers, mine are harmless. The first is the daddy long leg spiders. I came back from Sikasso after a week in the town and discovered that one had covered most of one of my doorways inside my house. Wondering how large of a web it would spin, I refrained from tearing it down. It covered most of the upper corner of the door. The other spider is a small, round spider that moves sideways more than forward. They are fast. I don't even try to kill them. These spiders like to hide behind the pictures taped on the wall, where they reproduce.
The cockroaches particularly enjoy hanging out in the small space under my water filter. I know cockroaches play into the circle of life that exists in my house, but I can't handle their chirping. I am glad I found their hiding spot because I can eliminate them quickly. They also enjoy hanging out in the cracks between the wood of my chairs under my gwa.
Once in a while the village swarm of bees visits my house. Apparently the trick is to burn some leaves in a bin to prevent them from entering your house. My host mom told me that I just need to stay inside of my house and u te foyi ke (they won't do anything). If you listen to bees buzzing that long, you will start to feel like you are going crazy. On that note, what is a bee-line? The shortest distance between two buzz stops!
Then there are the goats. They aren't in my house, but they are within my concession walls although they shouldn't be. They love, love, love to climb on the walls of the concession. I wake up some mornings to 7 or 8 of them on my walls and have to shoo them away. Baby goats are super cute though. Recently a goat chose to have a baby under my gwa. I had just been out of town and so had not put up all of my chairs outside of my gwa (put them in my house when I leave so they don't get stolen.) I know the goat. I never knew the goat well enough to name it, but I did know it. It was enormously pregnant for several months. It could hardly walk without it's belly reaching the ground. Three months ago my family tried to induce the goat, but it failed miserably because it was too early for it to give birth, though you would never have known by looking at it. Anyways, I came home and found two little baby goats and the mom-still gigantic- along with all of the lovely birthing fluids all over the place under my gwa. I told Fatumatah, Ba ye den jigi n ka gwa kono (literally, a goat set down a baby in my gwa) and asked who the tigi (owner) was. She was worthless and did nothing to help. I hid out in my house giving them their time and told my family a few hours later. They thought this was the funniest thing ever, but my homologue came and removed the baby goats so that the mama goat would follow it.
Then of course you have the sheep that leave their droppings all over the yard, the cows that wander into my yard and sometimes attempt to walk into my gwa. I heard an animal the other day and assumed it was a sheep because they are always around. Imagine my surprise to look up from my sudoku to see a cow a foot from my face. She clearly wasn't interested in sharing so continued her wandering elsewhere. The chickens squawk all morning, the roosters crow, occasionally a donkey gets ticked off and makes a mad sprint across my backyard hee-hawing his way along. I think it is so funny when they do this but it seems to scare people.
Creatures that have not taken up residency in my house yet are scorpions and I am very happy for it. Unlike other volunteers I have also not had any bats in my house. Also have not yet seen snakes near my house, although I did once see a snake in my village. I almost ran it over with my bike. That close. Maybe I am a parseltongue like Harry Potter? No more comments about this.
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Edward O. Wilson
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