So, after a few weeks here, I finally feel like I not only have a story worth telling, but even time to tell it! Yea for sleeping in the MCC office!
A little background information... The family I've been staying with in Dezam has a pig, a chicken with some chicks, and a cat. Sometimes at night the cat comes into my room. One night the cat jumped on me in the middle of the night. I turned on my flashlight to see what was happening & discovered that there are a number of large bugs that crawl around my room when its dark. I never really figured out why the cat jumped on me, but after that I decided to avoid turning on my flashlight at night.
So last Wednesday night we had a big rainstorm that started shortly after I went to bed and lasted through a good portion of the night. The cat came into my room almost immediately after it started raining. I heard it rustling around, and then I heard something fall. I hadn't had the lamp off long, so I went ahead and grabbed my flashlight & turned it on to find the cat nosing around in the basket I use to hold my clothes. It had tipped the basket over, so I got up & shooed it out.
A little while later, the cat came back in. By this point I was almost asleep so I was in that strange mental place between awake and dreaming. The cat meowed a few times and then started growling. I was a little afraid. Was the cat growling at me? Was the cat growling at a large bug? Was the cat demon possessed? (I was tired and afraid, ok?) Too afraid to turn on my light, I just laid there hoping that it was simply a matter of the cat disliking rain.
Sometime after that, I heard new noises. I laid there listening and finally concluded that the chicks had made their way into my room to get out of the rain. "Ok," I thought, "I have no problem with chicks." But then they started screaming. Immediately I concluded that a tarantula must be eating them. I felt horrible that these poor baby chicks were being consumed by a tarantula, but I'm terrified of arachnids, so I didn't know what to do. I finally convinced myself that it wasn't tarantulas, but instead it was the cat eating them. It wasn't really a pretty picture, but something I felt I could handle.
After hours of listening to the chicks scream I finally started dozing in and out of sleep. One of the times I woke up I decided that they weren't being eaten. They were probably hungry &/or were scared of lightening. Finally, 4:30 came.
I had to be at the MCC office at 5am Thursday, so I slowly sat up in bed, picked up my flashlight, and looked at the ground. No dead chicks. No chicks at all actually. But something was still making that screaming noise. I slipped on my flip-flops & moved toward the noise. It was coming from the basket with my clothes. I looked inside to find the cat curled up with 2 brand-new kittens.
Apparently the cat had given birth in the middle of the night. On one of my dresses. But my relief at not finding a tarantula devouring baby chicks helped me get past the disgust of a cat giving birth on my clothes.
The rest of Wednesday was pretty interesting as well. My flip-flop broke when I was crossing a river. Esther, Frantzo, Naomi & I climbed a mountain. The hike was gorgeous. My hiking was not. (Think back to our hiking trip, Malcolm. Yeah, I'm not in any better shape.) I took a nap on a rock by a waterfall for a couple hours while the others climbed up the waterfall to check on MCC's reforestation work. I watched women in short skirts with machetes in 1 hand and bags of avocados in the other hand climb up over the waterfall barefoot. I dropped my tennis shoe in a river. I ran through the river barefoot to try to catch it. I was unsuccessful in catching it. I found a boy by the river & asked if he'd seen a shoe float by. I started to cry when he said "no" & I realized that I only had 1 shoe to hike back down the mountain in. Then a girl further downstream found my shoe and gave it to me. I bathed under the waterfall. We hiked back down. We had lunch. Then we piled in the trucks to go to the beach for the MCC retreat.
Anyway, after all that, I dislike cats even more than I did before, and I now have a fear of losing my shoes in water. G'night.
-L
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5 comments:
I abhor cats at least as much as you do (no animal should compete with me for aloofness and haughtiness!), and I have no idea what it was like to live through that night's terror, but I keep pitying the poor mama cat.
She must have scoped out your nice, soft basket of clothes for her very painful ordeal.
Of course, I'm also terrified of childbirth, so that pr'bly affects my pity. I suspect you just, umm, discarded the dress?
What, you need reasons not to like cats?
It could have been worse. I mean, it could have been something disastrous like afterbirth and a Vera Wang.
But the tarantulas eating the chicks... as much as I loathe and fear spiders, I probably would have paid money to see a spider eating chicken. Baby chickens, to boot!
God bless the ruthless insanity of creation! Oh. Wait. He kinda already did.
In defense of the cat-
it's impressive that she was still defending you from those awful bugs even when she was in labor/delivering kittens.
Where's the thanks?
Is there no door to close to keep out unwanted critters (I know bugs don't use doors but maybe cats & chicks do)?
Mom
In the particular house, there is a door, but it doesn't entirely close (which is why the cat can come in). Besides, closing the door even partially keeps out any sort of breeze, so that options isn't ideal.
As for a door keeping out bugs, again, not in this house. The house is made out of clay (or mud?), and the clay was not packed very tightly. So bugs actually live in the walls.
Anyway, I've been told tarantulas are harmless, but I'm not entirely convinced.
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