6:30-8:30pm

Written at site, August 14^th 2011, 7:24pm

So, I’ve decided that my least favorite time of day is between 6:30pm and 8:30pm. The reasons are thus: At 6 or so, the sun begins to set. Ordinarily, this time of day is beautiful, but it also means the onset of prime-time mosquito buffet hours. Although I take a very powerful malaria prophylaxis, it’s still only 95% accurate at best. These two things tend to drive me inside. I am forced to acknowledge the waning hours of being able to read without squinting and with a sigh, I retire indoors. This leads to the second regret of the 6:30-8:30 hours: my false entomological bravado. Yea, I may have trapped and released way-faring bugs in a previous life, but I’m still a wuss. A big one. A line from an Alanis Morisette song comes to mind: “I’m sad but I’m laughing, I’m brave but I’m chicken-shit, I’m sick but I’m pretty, baby!” That’s the Peace Corps for you. Chicken shit.

Once I go inside I usually find myself sitting in my blue and white wooden slat chair in my kitchen/living room/mud room/workout room. The chair is reminiscent of one from pictures of upper-middle class families who wear white and khaki for a “candid” family photo with the perfectly posed and well-behaving chocolate lab on the beach in Destin, Florida. You know the ones. To be fair, those chairs are pretty comfortable. But we’re missing the point here: no one dresses like that in real life, chocolate labs never sit that still, and Chelsea is not in Destin. Thinking about sitting in a chair like that on a beach, perhaps with a cold beer in hand is quite relaxing. But between the hours of 6:30-8:30pm, I am not relaxed, no matter how many Coronas deep I imagine myself to be. My Destin chair is makes me feel safe, but I can’t leave once I’m there. It’s like watching the cooking channel: it’s so comforting and they make it look so damn easy but you know it’s going to get you in the end because no one can watch Paula Deen without gaining weight through osmosis. My chair is like that. A temporary safe place that has a downside you don’t want to admit. As I read by headlamp (squinting) the sounds associated with living in a mud-brick, tin roof home in the middle of nowhere West Africa are, to say the minimum, amplified. Since it’s dark, I’m alone, and yes, I’m a girl, they’re downright panic-inducing. Quite the opposite of Destin this time of year.

Yes, they’re mostly the same sounds that I hear during the day: pigeons landing, geckos slugging their soft bellies against the corrugation, lizards racing through the eves, their nails on a metal roof worse than the accidental scrape of Mrs. Yozzo’s nails on a chalkboard. (Mrs. Yozzo was my fifth grade teacher-a wonderful woman and a model educator with an unfortunate manicure). The sounds of my African roof make me wonder, though not too curiously, what I’m missing out on under my other, less alarming American shingled roof. Definitely not roosting chickens. I can rule those out because my parents’ neighborhood homeowner association has an ordinance against fowl-raising (and visible laundry lines, incidentally, though the latter rarely frighten me at night).

At 6:30pm, regardless of my best pep-talks, I nearly always find myself in my Destin chair, not thinking calming beach-y thoughts, with my feet tucked as close to the point directly below my tailbone as is physiologically possible. That is, unless I’m where I am now, which is cooking dinner at the table (toes curled under tarsals) which abuts the wall shared with The Cockroach Room.  I’m no fantastic story teller, but I bet you can tell what part of my house scares me even more than my roof. I’m not sure why I tuck my toes under my feet. It’s not like I think they’re going to get nibbled off as soon as the sun goes down (well, maybe I do- Africa and that dang malaria prophylaxis make you think funny things). Tucking them just makes me feel better in the way that explaining in a loud voice to another driver why his most recent lane change made you uncomfortable makes you feel better. You get the idea. All that to say, the sounds of my night-roof are far from comforting, and I’m beginning to feel like the visualization of me at the beach in Destin in a crisp bleached oxford isn’t doing much to lower my blood pressure either.

The Cockroach Room, in brief, is a puzzling little addendum to my cozy African home. It rests on the east side of my house and has its own door, no windows, and not other defining feature other than getting my hopes up when I read my site information packet for the first time: “Three Rooms house with metal door and windows. Separate latrine is constructed and floor is cemented.” If I were a real estate agent, I would draw attention to the smooth concrete floors, say something about them being warehouse-chic, and declare that such smooth concrete is a real treat for this neighborhood, and don’t they really set off the mud-brick construction and the hole you shit in?

Anyways, if you can’t tell from the generous description, the Cockroach Room is nothing exciting. It’s an empty room, about 5’x15’ that houses geckos, my bike, and enough cockroaches to make even the most intrepid PCV shudder. It is a major factor as to why I sit paralyzed with the heebie-jeebies in my Destin chair, night after night. You see, the cockroaches like to explore when the sun goes down. They enter my kitchen/living room/mud room/workout room along the beams connecting the Cockroach Room to my house. Occasionally, they fall to the floor. Hearing this tell-tale theck! and the consequent scuttling makes my adrenal glands pump, my sphincter contract, and my feet curl even farther under my body. In fact, as of this writing, I’ve moved locations three times--once because of dinner, once because a cockroach ran over my foot (good thing my toes were spared) and once because I heard a significantly attention-grabbing theck! and a distinct lack of scuttling. This means three things: most importantly that I’m a giant wuss. Second, the thing might have died courtesy of my hard, warehouse-chic flooring, or third, and most probably, IT COULD BE LURKING. Since I’m now tucked under the canopy of my mosquito net, I’ll kindly direct you my first conclusion and leave it at that.

As has been elucidated, the hours of 6:30-8:30pm are nothing short of harrowing for me. However, I realized while I was stalking a particularly sneaky cockroach with my trusty can of RAMBO BRAND bug spray, that if a mere infestation of bugs is my biggest worry, I’m one lucky gal indeed. All things considered, my life could suck A LOT more than the very little it does. I also giggled to myself because one, I’m stalking a freaking insect, and two, my life in America is going to KICK SO MUCH ASS when I get home, as it is highly unlikely that I will ever live in another place with a Cockroach Room. Victory.

Someday, in my future Cockroach Room-free home I’ll look back and laugh at the time in my life when I feared all scuttling and jumped and the sight of any small, dark object on the floor. (So what if it’s only a stray jigsaw puzzle piece from a bucolic farm scene my Aunt Re sent? It looked like it was going to charge). And so what if I’ll never be able to have a normal blood pressure between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30pm? (Also, does that count as cardio?) Until then, I’ll try my best to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. When 8:31pm rolls around I’ll just tuck in under my mosquito net for some bug-free sleep, and live to Peace Corps another day!