Rats!

Okay, I know you all would never admit to having rats/mice in your homes in the U.S., but I know you do, and so do we here in Haiti.

You may have seen Ben's post on the rat they had in Port-au-Prince and his semi-automatic- sniper-rifle-filled dreams to take that sucka out. We too have a rat. Instead of dreams, though, the rats themselves wake me up in the middle of the night as they find some scrap of food that interests them.

Our first clue that we may have rodents were those little black grains of rice that aren't actually grains of rice. Shoot! We have mice! -but it gets more complicated than that, because we also have lizards everywhere that eat bugs and don't bother anyone or anything, so we ignore them. These lizards also poop, and it's very close to mouse poo, so I told myself that we don't have mice, it's just the lizards. That was a few weeks ago.

This thought lasted until we found a tomato on our counter with little teeth marks in it. Not a lizard for sure; they don't eat tomatoes and they don't have teeth. So we have mice for sure, ick. We then obtained every lidded and lockable container we could to store our food in and became totally anal about keeping all food under lock and key. Well, they kept on coming, or so we heard in the middle of the night. Our search continued for how they were getting in the house, and eventually I found a hole in a window screen on a window that is fairly high off the ground (it's in our "bathroom") . So I sewed it up and figured that was the end of it. Next night the patch job was chewed out again! ick! We were headed to Port-au-Prince that day so I stopped worrying about it, packed my bags and left the rodents to our house.

The first day in Port I went to the grocery store, and saw a new rat/mouse shelf in the aisles. I stopped to look at every type of poison, sticky trap, snap trap, poison blocks, poison pellets, and poison that smells like peanut butter. This was like a sign from God that I should buy some supplies to get rid of these little buggers. I start looking at everything and putting things in my basket, reconsidering and putting them back on the shelf and trying to calculate how many, how big, and how vicious are my rats. I spy a trap called the Tomcat on the shelf; this thing has serrated edges, it's all black and truly menacing, and as I fondle the cool black trap of destruction and figure out how it works........SNAP!!!...... the thing springs on my thumb, a squeak comes out of me and I try to look like it doesn't hurt. A little stream of blood appears as I pry the trap off of my thumb. A man is watching me from the next aisle over and I whimper Li fo which means "It's powerful." Who leaves a set trap among grocery store merchandise? I gather my sticky traps, other means of mouse destruction, and aim for the checkout. Maybe God is telling me to leave them alone - ick, but they're so gross! Can't they just frolic in the fields outside with the bunnies or something?! Why do they have to put their gross little disease-infested bodies near our food?

So I get home and set the sticky trap on the window ledge under the hole that has been chewed and think, "this is it, tonight it's all over!" In the middle of the night I hear something hit the floor and the sound of a rodent struggling to get out of a sticky trap. I get up turn on the lights and search everywhere. The trap is gone, the mouse is gone, it's all gone. Where the heck did it go? So I get out another trap for the next night and put it in the window.

The next evening we walk into the house around 10pm and there it is a medium-sized brown devil on the floor. Sharon screams, it runs for cover, and then we corner it and set up a series of traps in all of its escape routes. I grab one of those hippie juggling sticks (the things you find when you move into a house in Haiti) and tear off its tassled ends and turn it into a rat whacker. The rat is scared and Sharon is still screaming each time it moves. And here I am, a 15-year vegetarian ready to whack the life out of an animal. It's cornered and it knows it, so it climbs up a wire (for our solar panel) that gives it access to a curtain string and WHACK! I swing at it, it falls and runs for the bedroom where a door is normally open. It gets to the door, find it closed, freaks out, runs up onto the dresser....."no, not on our dresser!" I go over to it and scare it out, and WHACK! again, and this time a screech comes out of the little bugger so I know it's injured, and it runs back into the kitchen and under a counter. I'm ready for it to come out again and block off its escape routes again. As I sit there poised with a flip-stick in my hand, the rat lays on its side and....dies. In the meantime, our neighbors come over in their jammies to ask why Sharon is screaming and we now have a dead rat in our house...is that worse? So I collect it and throw it outside as Sharon immediately grabs the bleach bottle and starts disinfecting the entire house.

We are freaked out and happy all at the same time; we go to bed happy because the walking disease in our home is now dead. We're also happy because we have house guests coming the next night that just might sleep on the living room floor (gross, I know).

Ben and Alexis arrive the next day and when its bedtime they decide to sleep on the roof under the stars. Awesome! No rats there. All is good until the middle of the night, when it starts raining. What?! Rain? it hasn't rained in 3 months and we have another 3 months to go until rainy season, but here is rain, real rain falling down and not stopping. Down they come, bedding in hand and slightly wet; we turn on the light to get them set up in the living room and there it is...another freaking rat. I grab the stick, it's cornered, and Sharon stands by the door to block its path. A few seconds goes by and somehow it manages to go just past Sharon's legs and just past Ben's foot as he tries to stomp on it (that would have been gross 'eh?) and out the door.

We all calm down and try to go bed. After a few hours we fall back asleep and pray that more little devils don't come into our house.

So here we are, house sealed up, window patched, and an order in for screen doors so we can still sleep with a door open to let cool air in. Good times, good times.

Sorry for everyone out there that loves rats, but really...I don't eat meat. So every animal saved can advocate for me when I kill a rodent.

Ick.