I’ve been both relieved and disappointed by the somewhat underwhelming amount of crazy creepy crawlies I’ve seen, besides the Stone Fish from last post, which I didn’t actually get to see myself. Still, we have had a few encounters of the animal kind.
Growing up and reading stories about missionaries in faraway lands, I thought that we would be beating off poisonous snakes and spiders the minute we stepped off the plane. I was expecting spiders the size of Chihuahuas but so far the only thing that’s really attacked anybody around here was a land crab, which darted out from under something in the workshop and snipped off a chunk of my coworker’s big toe. I was surprised to find not all crabs live in the water. Later we caught another land crab which was fed to the chickens because we were told by a local guy that chickens like to eat them. By the looks of the crab, I would be more concerned that the crab would eat the chickens but hey, they weren’t my chickens so I had no qualms about trying the experiment. The chickens are still in their coop. The crab is gone. Maybe it ran away. Maybe it was eaten. The results are inconclusive. I’ve heard reports that on some islands there are coconut crabs that are large enough to severe your finger with their claws. Maybe someday I’ll see one but so far no luck.
Locals like to try and sell missionaries any animal, plant, or object they think we may be interested in. There have been people at the gate trying to sell Cockatoos, Tree Kangaroos, crabs, Birds of Paradise, a Toucan looking thing, wooden carvings, fish, bayonets from WWII, and different varieties of orchids, just to name a few. Just start asking around for what you want and the word will spread in the community. You’ll soon have entrepreneurs dragging exotic things out of the bush and onto your doorstep. I bought a few wooden masks that scared the children, but no animals yet. We’re in the market for a nice bird though. I’ll have to ask around and see what shows up.
We do have some pet cockroaches, I guess, although that’s one thing nobody has tried to sell us. Janice and I were sitting in the living room the other morning. I was sipping coffee and Janice was sipping Yerba Mate. This isn’t the weak kneed Yerba you’ll find in a hipsters cup at your local foofoo coffee shop. This is the Yerba that a grizzled outlaw who is living on the run in the Paraguayan jungle drinks from a cow horn covered in leather. It stands your taste buds at attention and then marches them right down your throat, despite their cries of anguish and horror, straight to your heart which they beat like a drum at a heavy metal concert. We were sitting there when suddenly a blood curling scream exploded from our bedroom, ricocheted around the walls of the living room, and disappeared behind the fridge, where most things in the kitchen go to disappear. Adi soon came stumbling out, rubbing her eyes, and crying.
Adi was sleeping on Oliver’s bed, which is a cheap foam mattress on our bedroom floor, because she had a bad dream. The deal is that our children can’t sleep in our bedroom unless they have a bad dream, a policy that results in what I suspect are many flimsy and even fabricated claims of bad dreams. However, at 3am the will to investigate fraudulent claims is pretty low, let alone the desire to meter out any consequences. “Go shleep with Oliver,” I usually mumble through my pillow. This morning, however, sleeping in mommy and daddy’s room hadn’t saved her from something scary.
“Something crawled over me!” Adi sputtered her words through her tears.
Janice and I looked at each other. I laughed and Janice scolded me for it. “Poor child!”
We both knew what had crawled over her. Earlier that morning I went toe to toe with a cockroach in our bathroom. You would think that I would have an unfair advantage, what with my toes being much larger, but you’d be wrong. Various knick-knacks clattered to the floor. A shower curtain was dislodged. The little pest escaped under the bathroom sink and leered at me, waving his antennas to the tune of “Na Na Na Na Na.” Still, life must go on, despite immature cockroaches. I’d kill him next time I was sitting on toilet.
But apparently this cockroach wasn’t content to sit in his little hole in the wall so he scurried out of our bathroom to explore the big unknown. Imagine his surprise, then, when a mountain he summited suddenly sat up and shrieked! He must’ve thought it was a volcano. A few minutes later I found the culprit out scurrying around the hallway, probably in a state of shock. I smushed him twice and kicked him out of the door while his feet were still twitching. I didn’t even feel bad about it.
I used to be delighted when I’d find a cockroach because I’d feed it to our herd of sugar gliders. Sugar gliders are little flying marsupials that resemble flying squirrels. Janice called them flying rats. They have a flap of stretchy skin on both sides of their body, between their front and back legs. They can spread their legs apart, stretching the skin into wings. It looks almost exactly like those crazy people in wing suits jumping off cliffs, if those crazy people also had eyes that protruded from their heads as if someone had squeezed them too tightly and popped their eyeballs out of their sockets. Sugar gliders can jump from high things and land on other things, like your head, in the blink of an eye and completely unannounced. It can be an unsettling transition to go from sipping coffee to having a marsupial in your hair without any time to get used to the idea. This is why we locked ours in a cage most of the time. That, and they would also bite occasionally.
How did we end up with sugar gliders? One day Chris, our Medical-And-Everything-Else-Director on base, asked me if I’d like to take them. “Our kids kind of grew out of them,” he said, which made sense to me. My kids were still young and interested in these things. Well, at the least, the kid inside of me was. I could have the cage, the feeding dishes, the whole setup. I agreed and the same day I found all the sugar glider paraphernalia on our back porch, along with four beady eyed little critters. Apparently all the families on base had taken their turn wanting them and then getting rid of them. We were the unsuspecting new family. This should have been a red flag but I’m a sucker for exotic animals. At one point in my life I even considered being a veterinarian, until I found out it required schooling. Anyway, I was delighted with our new acquisition. My children were too.
At first we stationed them in our living room and occasionally I’d let one out of the cage. They would scurry around the house climbing curtains and bookshelves, with our children squealing after them, trying to catch them but horrified they would. One day a sugar glider jumped off the couch and onto Elliot’s head and then scurried down his body. The sugar glider rode Elliot’s calf like a bucking bronco because panic had taken control of Elliot’s large motor skills and was thrashing his limbs around like a cheap puppet. Elliot was a little gun-shy after that.
I soon found that “growing out” of sugar gliders takes about two months. Sugar gliders are nocturnal (this is why they have such big eyes – to see at night!) so they sleep during the day. You have a small window in the evening where they start waking up while you start going to bed. Going to bed is in an inconvenient time for extra drama. They pooped and peed a lot and soon I realized how much fruit we were feeding the little freeloaders. They got moved outside. And eventually I found I was the only member of the family who was interested in them. And that was only because Janice would wait until I flopped down in bed, wriggled under the sheet, and sighed contentedly before she would ask, “Did you feed the sugar gliders today?”
During this time our language helper, Jeremy, had mentioned that he thought the sugar gliders were cool. One day I asked him, “Jeremy, would you like the sugar gliders? I’d give you the whole setup. Cage, feeding dishes, everything. And I’d even put them on a pickup and drop them off at your house for you.” Fortunately he said yes.
While I don’t miss the sugar gliders at all, I do miss feeding them cockroaches. They love eating cockroaches and geckos. I liked the idea of turning waste cockroaches into a valuable source of protein for my livestock. Now I just kick cockroaches out the door like they’re trash, which is a waste of protein, if you think about it.
Another waste of protein is spiders.
Adi has been carefully keeping track of the spiders in the house. That might not sound like a bad idea to you but keep in mind these are the smallest little spiders you’ve ever seen, because if they’d be much smaller you’d never see them. But she doesn’t only keep track of them, she worries about them.
“Daddy, there’s a spider in the bathroom and it moved.”
“Ok Adi,” I’ll say, ankle deep in Tok Pisin, which is much as I can handle without losing my balance. If it was just water, being ankle deep isn’t a big deal unless it’s inside your kitchen or something. But Tok Pisin is like sticky tropical mud and being ankle deep in that is no small thing. Adi doesn’t care what my ankles are in, literally or metaphorically, so she keeps talking.
“Spiders are scary.”
“How big is it?”
She pauses then decides that’s an irrelevant question so she doesn’t bother answering. “Come kill it.”
“Adi, can I kill it later?”
“But Daddy, you said that yesterday.”
“Ugh. Why must I do it now?”
“Daddy, what if I need to go the bathroom?”
“I think you’ll be fine, I’d just go.”
Her worried look intensifies, which is a common reaction when you’re moments away from having a head on collision with something you don’t want to do.
I finally got up, grabbed our leather flyswatter we brought with us from Ohio, and pounded every the corner of the bathroom with heavy artillery, which satisfied Adi immensely. She could finally go to the bathroom.
One day the kids were brushing their teeth in the bathroom. I was standing behind them like a drill instructor making sure no shenanigans occurred when out of the corner of my eye I saw something large and brown skitter from behind the door and across the floor, stopping right under the stool that Adi was standing on. I leaned over and looked from a safe distance. Sure enough, it was a large spider. If I was a chicken I’d be delighted to see a large snack but I’m not so my hairs involuntarily stood up so fast that a small breeze blew through the bathroom.
“Adi, Elliot, quick get out of the bathroom.” I said, while pushing them outside the door. I didn’t want Adi to see the spider or she’d never go in the bathroom again.
“Just stay there,” I said, cool as a cucumber, holding my children back with one hand and swinging the toilet paper stand with the other. The spider, in what can only be described as a miraculous display of legwork, evaded my precision strikes and escaped through a dark hole in the tile under the bathtub.
Two weeks later Janice found it sauntering through our other bathroom and, once her voice returned to a pitch that was audible to humans, she politely asked me to kill it. Knick-knacks clattered to the floor. A shower curtain was dislodged. It didn’t get away this time and was struck down with vengeance in the middle of our shower, which is a convenient place to kill a large spider full of squishy spider juice.
Besides that one, which isn’t around anymore, they’re not many sizable spiders around the house. I think the large gecko population keeps the spider population in check. And I’d rather live with an army of geckos than with a single large spider. In fact, geckos are so cute that we’ve been trying to catch one to keep as a pet. The other night I rounded up Elliot and Oliver and we walked around the house several times trying to catch geckos. I was told that if you put a light in their eyes, you can catch them but I haven’t found it helps. After several rounds of the house, the geckos got smart and moved up near the eves, out of reach. I’ve been told they die quickly in captivity anyway, which is actually a selling point to me. It’s nice to have a pet that doesn’t live any longer than your children’s attention spans. Besides, even if they die, they still pass as a serviceable toy. I present the following video as evidence.
Since we’re living in what I’d call an urban setting, we don’t see the fauna and flora of the bush. Like I mentioned before, I find this both relieving and disappointing. Like my children who want to catch the sugar glider but are scared they might actually do it, I want to see more exotic wildlife and yet I’m scared I might actually encounter some.
My brother Matt wants to come to Papua New Guinea and mount an expedition to find flying dinosaurs reportedly in existence on an island off the coat of Lae. It’s like Papua New Guinea’s version of Bigfoot. I always enjoy considering alternative theories to conventional wisdom (some people reportedly call them conspiracies) but that doesn’t mean I always believe them. I just like asking “What if?” If it happens it will get me out of this urban setting, which I’m both happy and nervous about. The Papua New Guinea bush is no joke and deeply respect the missionaries who live there. It makes me feel a little bit like a wimpy missionary. Still, I’m happy I don’t live in the bush. So some days when I feel a bit cooped up, I have to remind myself we aren’t here to be wild adventurers, we’re here to make a difference. And the best way to do that is to be reliable, steady, and keep the airplanes flying, with maybe the occasional break from routine if family visits.
Thanks for praying, giving, and/or reading.
Until next time,
Josh
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