Bat Remedies and Surprise Visits

There are bats that fly around my house at night. They poop and pee on my floor, and more ironically, on the closed lid of my toilet. Sigh. It’s nice to see that their hearts are in the right place at least.

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Every once in a while, right after sunset, I’ll be eating dinner or something and turn to stand up, and a bat will dart around a corner from nowhere, wind under my arm, and shoot away. I never feel or hear anything, since they’re almost completely silent and they never touch me, so I’m left trusting only my sense of sight. I would want to question their existence entirely if they didn’t empty their little bat bowels on nearly every flat surface in my house.

It’s important to understand that all houses in Nicaragua are built such that there is anywhere from a 3 to 10-centimeter gap between the tops of the walls and the roof, and my house is no exception. The roof is made of sheets of corrugated zinc, the roofing material of choice, and there are 3 or 4 mango trees whose branches touch and extend over the top of the house, making quite a racket when the wind blows.

I think the bats enter the house by way of these branches, although I suppose it could just be their advanced powers of flight and echolocation. I like to think there’s something I can do about it though, and thus I have settled upon the explanation of the trees. I have plans to chop down some branches to see if the bats go away.

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Now I know you’re probably thinking, “Why don’t you ask what everyone else does about bats, surely they have the same problems?”

Well, fictional concerned reader, I have asked multiple Santa Lucians about the bats (they’re called murciélagos in Spanish), and indeed it is a common occurrence to be paid a visit at night. But it seems that the common remedy for ridding a house of the winged rodents is to “put something red in there.”

Now as much as I want to believe that this could work, I’m forced to be a little skeptical since a significant portion of the walls in my house are actually painted red and the bats are very obviously undeterred, but maybe I’m not understanding the intricacies of the treatment.

Another common remedy I’ve heard from multiple sources is to hang a bunch of garlic in the house. I have a sneaking suspicion that this too, is not going to work. As far as I know, these bats are not vampires.

(As a corollary to vampires, I was thinking the other day that the high number of machetes per capita in Nicaragua is going to make for an interesting situation once we’re faced with the zombie apocalypse.)

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So I really don’t know what to do about the bats, but with my burgeoning language skills I’m learning that having conversations with neighbors and strangers alike is pretty fun and often times quite entertaining.

The other day I was visited by a neighbor, a woman who lives about a block away, who arrived on my doorstep asking for a cooking pot she had left with the last volunteer in Santa Lucia whose house I am living in, and which I still had in my kitchen. I invited her in and got the pot.

Then she handed me a strange sticky bottle. It smelled kind of like cheap fruity chapstick—like LipSmackers or something. The woman told me that she didn’t know what the bottle was, but that the previous volunteer, a female, had given it to her before she’d left. I took the bottle, gave it a tentative sniff, and read the label (in English, which the woman couldn’t read). The label boasted such qualities as “Never Sticky!” and “Tastes Great!” Turns out that the other volunteer had given this woman a bottle of raspberry-flavored lube as a parting gift, and had not explained what it was.

I couldn’t restrain myself and let out a short laugh at the absurdity of it all as the woman went on to explain that she thought it was some kind of skin-care treatment. I struggled to keep my composure and eventually worked up the self-control to tell her what lube is for.

“I’m pretty sure this is for having sex,” I said, handing the bottle back to her.

She didn’t seem all that affected by the news. She nodded her understanding and went on to request that I sell her my gas stove when I leave in two years.

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It didn’t really hit me until a few hours later how hilarious that encounter was, and I’m realizing now that some of the more mundane everyday experiences I’m having in Nicaragua ought to be shared. That is why I’m going to try and keep up with writing down these experiences as much as possible. And please notice the clever opposing directions diction used in the previous sentence, just one more reason you should continue to read this blog.

Ant Souls

I wrote this piece in early January 2011.

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I’ve finally moved into my little house in Santa Lucia, 2 blocks from the police station, hopefully the place where I’ll live for the next 2 years. It’s definitely an adjustment living alone…accordingly, sometimes I feel pretty lonely. So far though, I am much more content here than I was living with my 6-week host family. But feeling the freedom to do as I please is both a blessing and a curse.

I’m taking on a lot of new responsibilities at once right now. I’m learning how to buy stuff in order to support my basic needs, like soap, sugar, toilet paper, and toothpaste. I’m learning to cook, little by little, one experiment a little more complex than the last—I made mandarin juice today, fresh-squeezed even. I’m learning how to plant a garden, for real this time (as opposed to training): how to find tools, how to prepare the land, how to lay it out according to the kind of space there is, how to build a fence, how to make organic pesticides, and on and on.

        
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Most recently however, I’m learning how to deal with an infestation of ants. I’ve been obsessing over how to get rid of the ants for a couple days now, and I think I might be developing a bit of a complex…I dreamt about swarming ants last night, somehow coupled with the idea of the difficulty of learning Spanish, and it made for a bit of a restless night. It doesn’t help that the house has three or four Salvador Dali prints on the walls left by its previous inhabitant…

The ants show up in the house very punctually at 6 o’clock every night, just after sunset. At first I freaked out and tried to sweep them out immediately, stepping on many of their crunchy bodies in the process. But the little automatons just came scurrying right back in, despite being swept what must have felt like a mile away for them (proportionate to their body size). Yesterday though, I remembered that ants follow pheromone trails and this thought made me change my plan of attack.

I actually find ants to be fascinating creatures when they aren’t invading my home. Their brilliance as a species has an intensely interesting emergent quality to it. In their mindless swarming there exists a mechanism that allows them to do really intelligent things as a collective hive through the trial and error of those thousands of essentially unintelligent drones.

Ants leave pheromone trails behind them when they explore, chemicals secreted from some tiny gland hidden away in their exoskeleton-encrusted bodies, which is used kind of like a trail of bread crumbs to follow back to the nest. But pheromones also act as a trail towards the place being explored, so the more ants that happen to follow the trail, the stronger and more irresistible the pheromone marker becomes, turning the path into an ant superhighway.

Well, my house is not a superhighway, ants. And that is why I bought a can of RAID and you will all soon be dead.

As much as I think it is wrong to kill living beings, I also think that they come in different degrees of souledness. That is, depending on soul size (or the quality of consciousness), there are varying levels of acceptability in killing. I understand that this goes against many notions of egalitarianism and is therefore a kind of incendiary idea, but I’ve thought a lot about it, and it seems to make some sense.

For example, I would never kill a dog or a cat or a pig because they have relatively large souls, i.e. well developed consciousnesses (consciousnesses that more closely mirror our own), but I would kill and I have killed countless ants and mosquitoes without a second thought. Should I still feel some moral turbulence for doing this? Or am I correct in devaluing certain life forms on the supposition that their capacity for consciousness and therefore suffering, is inconsequential. At any rate, the idea of large and small souledness is taken from a book called I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter—check it out.

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So in the case of this particular ant infestation, I had no qualms about spraying insecticide all over the place. The ants as individuals really do not have souls in a meaningful way and I can kill them without feeling guilty. I am glad I did too, because now my house is pretty much ant and cockroach free.

The bats are another story though.

The Only Difference Between Slaughter and Laughter is an S.

So I finally have a blog set up! It's taken me almost 7 months in Nicaragua to get it together, but here it is. I've been writing over the past few months, and this first post is something I wrote on January 1st, 2011. It's a meditation on the ethics of butchering animals and the humanity that seems to be thrown into question in the process.

A little dark and a little dramatic I know, but hey, I was right in the middle of learning Spanish and assimilating into Nicaraguan culture...

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I've just witnessed the slaughter of a pig.

There have been two or three sulking chanchos out in the back patio area of my host family's house for a few weeks now, tied up to tree roots and fence posts, oinking at all hours and shitting underneath the hanging lines of drying clothes.

When the hogs were first tied up out there, I was on my way to the latrine one evening, lighting my way with the handy lantern built into my cell phone, when I tripped over a squishy mound that let out a squeal as my foot made unexpected contact with its face. I know I should have expected a prostrate pig to be guarding the entrance to the bathroom like a malevolent troll, but I was startled and I swore loudly...then apologized, stepping over it and proceeding into the latrine.

Just a few minutes ago I watched as that pig, or maybe one of its similarly doomed compañeros, met its fate at the hands of my host brothers. There was a paralyzing flood of fragmentary thought and emotion that coursed through me as I watched the animal slain. On the one hand I felt truly sorry for the animal, projecting fear and pain into its death screams, and on the other, I told myself it was just another part of human existence—of the carnivorous existence of millions of other predatory creatures across the globe.

All predators kill their prey, right? But what then makes people different from lions and tigers and bears? Surely there's a difference.

The slaughter began when Walter dragged the pig by its ears, squealing in protest, over to what appeared to be some sort of sacrificial altar made of stone and concrete slabs (like the Stone Table in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe used to torture Aslan). Another guy, a neighbor who lives nearby, took a large wooden club, literally a human-sized version of what a giant might use to smash peasants, and cracked the pig a good one right on the head like he was hitting it out of the park. The poor animal crumpled under the furious blow and Walter ran around with a dagger and made a lime-sized hole in its throat. The blood poured out as if through a ruptured dam, its bright hue contrasting strikingly with the dark brown of the mud. That blood must have just come from its lungs, I thought, probably still rich with oxygen it would no longer need.

As the candy-apple blood pooled and eddied on the ground, the pig kicked and thrashed while three or four guys tried to hold it down. Walter, with the knife in one hand, plunged the other into the throat-hole (whose initial deluge was quickly slowing to a bloody trickle) in an attempt to find the esophagus. He had a certain degree of difficulty with this, and another guy tried his luck, this time a relative visiting for the Año Nuevo celebration wearing only shoes and a blue blanket tied around his waist, and who appeared to have just woken up from the previous night's festivities. After a few seconds of rummaging around inside the hole with the pig still making noises and flailing about, he was successful. Walter quickly sliced through the air pipe and the frantic jerking slowed significantly. In the end, Walter and most of the guys holding the pig down were splattered with a certain amount of blood—a fitting testament to their gory task.

What really struck me though, through all of the butchery and carnage, was the laughter. They hooted and hollered, guffawing as the blood was thrown onto their ecstatic faces. What was that?  

Was it a wild and primal blood-lust that burst forth out of their violence, sounding as an expression of mirth? Maybe. But I think it was something else—something a bit more human.

It seems to me that they laughed to shield themselves from the horror. To deal with it. If they felt any revulsion in what they were doing, they certainly weren't going to express it by recoiling or showing any sign of spinelessness. That would have been socially out of the question for these guys, ensconced as they are in the culture of machismo. So instead of reacting directly to the terribleness, the emotional charge that came with the act of violently ending another creature's life was rerouted, channeled into laughter, and thus presented itself as an exhilarated gaiety.

The guy with the club gave me a giddy replay of his game winning home-run, eagerly seeking my approval. I forced a smile and nodded, lacking the words or cultural understanding to muster an appropriately subtle response.

But I can imagine a lion or tiger laughing too... As the animal rips into the flesh of its kill, blood matted in its fur and splashed upon its snout, its laughter echoes with a Darwinistic fury and a wild, primal revelry. The human laughter on the other hand, is different. This laughter is born of an intrinsic empathy and a basic guilt; it is a shrewd laughter, and this at least gives me hope. There is a difference there, and it is in that difference that we find humanity.

Fifty minutes later as I look at the site where the pig was killed, the coagulated blood is being picked over by a swarm of black vultures and a few skeletal stray dogs. I need to believe in that humanity right now, isolated as I am from most everything I'm familiar with. To believe otherwise would be insane.