Open Doors

One thing that has taken a little getting used to here has been the open doors and open windows policy. Even in the very cold mornings during the first days of training, and even when it was raining, my host family would frequently leave the house door open.

Here in my permanent site, the door is frequently open. It causes a problem for me because I am under constant attack from mosquitoes—one night in my room, I killed five of them and was very close to freaking out. Before I moved here, my family put a screen door in my room which allows air flow and keeps everything else out, but it still can’t compensate for all the insects coming in and out of the house during the day. I’ve tried using room spray, plug-in insecticide and Cutter and nothing has really worked. I’m not even sure the mosquito net that Peace Corps could give me would be able to accomplish much of anything either. So for the last two months, I’ve been fairly miserable. It’s one thing to get mosquito bites, but for me, they take weeks for the itching to subside and to heal. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, no matter how much anti-itching cream I’ve applied, and still keep scratching. It’s pretty awful because there is no relief. Almost as bad as when I shave my legs and hit a few of the bites: my legs have a few craters from that that will take even longer to heal.

But today, it wasn’t the mosquitoes that came in through the door. I came upstairs to my room, and caught a glimpse of movement in my eye. I thought I saw a kitten. “Oh my God, Serg, please tell me you saw that,” I said to my host sister who was cleaning the house. “No, what are you talking about?” she asked. “I think there’s a kitten in my room!” And when we walked into my room, and I got on my stomach to peer under the bed, there was an incredibly tiny kitten. It must have been an effort to climb the 30+ stairs to get to the third floor of our house and into my room.

Then began a twenty minute effort in order to corral the kitten. It ran out of my room and into another, and then hid in a cupboard. Serg was trying to scare it by using the handle of a broom, which really wasn’t helping. I told her to be gentle with it. Gentle, until I slowly put my hand in the cupboard and the tiny creature started hissing at me! I tried to pick it up with a blanket so it wouldn’t bite or scratch me, but I couldn’t get a hold of it. It was incredibly tiny and frantically ran around the summer porch trying to escape, to no avail. It even tried jumping a foot in the air into the doors. Eventually it hid behind my shoes and Serg picked it up in a blanket once and for all, the kitten hissing the whole way down the stairs, down the outside stairs, and out into the street.

Now someone else might have to go through the same thing: as soon as we set it down in the street, it ran frantically back into the direction of our house, and narrowly pinched through our neighbor’s gate. Let’s see how they handle a kitten in their house.