This story is positively gross. If you plan on judging me, I suggest you avoid reading it (especially if you have food around you, or plan on consuming some at any point in the next 72 hours).

During the first few weeks at my house in the village of Sideradougou, Burkina Faso, where I lived for two years during my Peace Corps service, I spent a lot of time cleaning the place up. The volunteers before me, a married couple, had left nearly six months before I arrived, and the house had not really been kept up during that gap. It was actually quite in disarray, but at least it gave me a ‘project’ of sorts to concentrate on during the beginning when everything was weird and awkward in village, and I had no idea what I was doing there (not much of that really changed drastically later on anyways).  At any rate, after about a month I had finally gotten the place set up how I had wanted, cleaned it up with some help, made a few modifications, and got some new furniture – it was finally starting to feel like home.

However, there was a small, continuing problem. I had received a care package from my parents in the United States, with a Costco sized bag of Cheez-its as its main prize. I would leave them out on a recently constructed but very uneven shelf that I used as a pantry in my kitchen area. Overnight,  I often heard weird noises and shuffles around my house, but given my deathly fear of bugs at the time, I refused to get out of my impregnable mosquito net fortress (like hiding under the covers as a child, I assumed I was ‘safe’ in there). Yet one morning, I was looking over that beloved box of Cheez-its (as I typically did first thing every day), and saw some scratch marks towards the bottom. Someone, or something, seemed to have been trying to get into them – this was personal now. I told a friend of mine in village about it, and he quickly figure out the issue – some unwanted houseguests had remained even after the intensive clean up, and were now trying to sabotage the one thing making me happy.

In short, there were rats in my house. Not to worry my friend, Dimanche (Sunday in English, as he was born on a Sunday), told me. It was bound to happen and probably will again, but it’s fairly easy to get rid of them with a little poison and a lot of death.  Given closer inspection around my house, the prevailing notion was that instead of just a single newfound roommate, I had in fact a whole family of squatters. Thus we would need to put out a decent amount of poison, probably for multiple nights in a row, to make sure we got all of them.

While I am not a huge fan of genocide, even for rats, I am a huge fan of Cheez-its. If it came down to them versus my prized care package possession, well that was an easy choice. We went out and acquired the poison, placed it strategically right in front of the increasingly crooked pantry shelves (ironically that Dimanche, a builder by trade, had constructed), and mixed it amongst some food (peanut butter, and I even sacrificed a single Cheez-it in order to save the rest) to fool these silly rats into a delicious death. We left it there, and I went into my mosquito net fortress as usual, but with open ears to hopefully hear a sudden stop of all the shuffling in the middle of the night.

The next morning I awoke and went to check the poison area, but I did not have my glasses on. I didn’t see much and assumed it hadn’t worked. Oh well, I went to take a shower – unlike most volunteer houses in Burkina, I had an indoor shower. There was no running water of course, but it just meant there was a small dark room in my house with a tiny pipe leading outside (the type of pipe that various rodents could conceivably easily crawl the other way back in) where I could take a bucket shower indoors (it was the definition of middle class Sideradougou life).

While showering in this 2×2 closet sized room or sorts, I noticed something large near the pipe. I still didn’t have my glasses on and had already begun showering, so I continued, but attempted to stand near the entrance, and away from whatever that motionless thing was. I finished, got dressed, and put on my glasses. When I returned to inspect the brown blob that I had showered with, I was astonished to see that it was a dead rodent. It had worked! I soon walked around my house and saw another dead rodent in the hallway, and two in the kitchen. Never had I been so happy to see dead animals all over the place, my Cheez-its would be safe now! It may have been a bit weird to accidentally ritually cleanse yourself with the dead body of something you had just killed, but hey I was in Burkina Faso now, and a lot of things were a bit weird.

to be continued . . .

The not-so straight pantry shelf that housed my prized care package possessions