Saturday 31 May 2014

Mission Against Vermin

We may be part of MAF, but these past 2 weeks I have felt like I am also part of MAV: Mission Against Vermin!

It was a dark Monday evening when I first heard a suspicious munching in the corner of my kitchen. Everyone else was sleeping. Andrew was far away in Juba. I grabbed a broom and advanced slowly into the centre of our kitchen, eyes fixed on the corner where gnawing could be heard...With one swift movement, I attacked the cupboard door where the sound seemed to be coming from. I bashed it and crashed the broom against the wood. The munching stopped. Cautiously, I approached the cupboard. I flung open the door. Nothing was there except pots and pans, their metal edges twinkling at me in the light of the overhead florescent bulb.

Anyone who has followed blog posts from "Tales From Tanzania" will know how afraid I am of rats and mice! The suspicion that one might be in my kitchen was very disturbing. I went to bed that night feeling uneasy, jumping at the slightest rustle, scared of encountering a rodent without Andrew being around to protect me!

Two days later, I was dismayed to wake up and discover that our bread had been eaten in the night! I came into the kitchen early to start breakfast for a normal school day, but quickly saw that toast would be off the menu: the bread had been burrowed into from the corner, with big bite marks through the plastic packet and a rat shaped hole protruding a few inches into the loaf! YUK! Now I had proof: a rodent was roaming my kitchen!
Tentative investigation also revealed a few droppings behind the oven. Horrified, I pulled out all the kitchen appliances and looked in vain for the little creature. Happily, I had a lady called Mary coming to help me to clean that morning. When Mary arrived at 07:30, as I left for the school run, I asked her to take everything out of every cupboard, to disinfect the cupboards and to clean all the pots, pans, dishes etc and put all food in the fridge. She scrubbed and cleaned all morning! No more evidence of the mouse was seen that day.

The next day, we found more droppings and items on the kitchen counter had been moved about by Something scurrying about! I was on high alert for combat against the vermin loose in our Nairobi home!

Once Andrew came home at the weekend, we stepped up the effort to discover the hiding place of our unwelcome kitchen visitor. And we found him! Mr. Rodent was snuggled into a compartment within the mechanics at the back of our fridge! We had 2 guests staying with us last weekend and they kindly assisted us in ousting the beastie from his hiding place. This was fortunate, since I had run screaming out of the kitchen as soon as Andrew spotted the rodent in his hiding place! At least Andrew now had sensible assistants, as he prepared for all-out battle:
 This is the weapon Andrew used to scare the rat (or was it a mouse??) out of its hiding hole! It shot out of the fridge and straight across the kitchen to disappear into a tiny gap between the tiled floor and the bottom of the cupboards! Armed with a head-torch, Andrew and one of our guests could see it running, terrified, up and down within the thin space:
 The rat was foo fast to be caught, but Andrew's weapon did reach in to attack it and possibly injure it. We haven't seen it since, but we rushed out and bought this trap, which is poised with bread and peanut butter bait next to the fridge:
I am a bit squeamish about checking it, but Ben is a great help in peering round to see if anything is caught and reporting back to his cowardly Mum! So far, it lies dormant, although we have just seen a rat on our back patio this evening! However, I can handle them being outdoors. I just don't want them in my house!

On a similar note this week, I  had to visit the chemist on Tuesday, to ask for a bottle of nit shampoo to wash all our heads, since we also had a suspected outbreak of headlice! Just a smaller version of vermin! As the kind pharmacist handed me the bottle of chemicals, she enquired as to whether I was familiar with this type of medical formula?  I lost my courage and just could not bring myself to tell her that it is the same brand as the scabies medicine we had to order from England when Ben had scabies in Dodoma!

Vermin in the kitchen, vermin on our heads and a now a reminder of the vermin that took up residence on little Ben when he was just 2 years old, back in Tanzania! I am just grateful that here in Nariobi we have good access to traps, super-germ-killing cleaning products and medicated treatments to help us in our mission against all the little nasties which we have been exposed to recently! Hopefully, we are on a winning streak now in our battle to be rid of all the little invaders!

1 comment:

  1. Oh the joys of missionary life !! xx

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