Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

9.19.10

Tomorrow I will officially have been a Peace Corps volunteer for one month. Pretty amazing. Overall, time has flown -I can’t believe I’ve been in Peru 31/2 months- though a few minor blips have made it difficult. The most major of those blips: my flea/bedbug scare last week.

Not sure if you can really call it a scare. They were definitely here…in my rug, in my bed and, I’m pretty sure, in a couple pairs of my pants. Which led me to bump up my Chiclayo visit and head down on Friday morning where I happily let my mom fill me in on the bedbug epidemic in the US and let her create a comprehensive plan of attack which, if you don’t know Mary Ellen well, is her forte.

I immediately felt better after talking to her though a few tears were shed about how gross the whole thing was and how difficult it was to face alone. You see, once I noticed the jumping fleas in my rug and, upon waking up the next morning, saw the multitude of tiny bites all over my body (Lord, is this gross) I decided to solve the problem myself.

First I cleared out my sheets, bedspread, rug, and many clothes from my room and threw them in a bucket of hot (thank you Dave for sharing your electric teapot) soapy water, scrubbed my floor and bedframe with bleachy and then headed back out to scrub by hand the buggiest items from my bedroom.

After a long day of clean sweeping, I headed upstairs for dinner with the fam. I was in a completely sour, disgruntled mood, tired from a whole day of cleaning and sure that the bugs were still hiding somewhere in my room. I quietly ate my bread and drank my tea. When my host-mom poured a hot bowl of pig head soup for my host-dad I tried not to notice. But when they scooped up half a pig jaw, molars still intact, offered it to me, and then laughed their heads off, I just couldn’t take it.

That might have been funny another day. Today it is more so. But that night it was just one more thing I couldn’t quite handle. So I came back down to a room smelling of bleach and layed down on the plastic of my completely stripped bed and thought, “Get me outta here.”

I went over to visit the nurse and she mace me feel much better. She too had had fleas in her bed when she first moved to Bolivar but she figured them out as, she assured me, I would too.

Together we decided I should head down to buy what I heard as “ReyMax” but ended up being “Raid.” Hehe. She even helped me reserve a spot on the bus…by walking down to the police station to find the big guy who drives the bus on Friday mornings.

Anyway, it was a good trip to Chiclayo though I felt the strain of having spent so much money my first trip down. (Yikes! $10 a day doesn’t get ya too far in the big city!) But now I am happily back in Bolivar feeling good, running everyday, and knitting a purple poncho. I’m feeling busy and, so far, bug free! I’ve flea sprayed everything, wrapped my mattress and pillow in plastic and tied up dirty clothes in plastic bags. So hopefully, thanks to the magical workings of my mom, my room should be relatively flea free for a while…I’ll keep ya posted.