So I do promise to eventually let everyone know what I am actually doing over here service-wise eventually, but I find it much more fun to type stories about the adventures of my day to day rather than the boring minutia of my duties as a service volunteer. So continuing in that vain, let's talk about the spider that I just battled. Up until this point I was under the impression that this country was slowly but surely curing me of my fear of that which creeps and crawls. I scoff at cocroaches, I kill many winged insects with my bare hands, and ruthlessly hunt down the crickets that find their way into my home in the wee hours of the morning to wake me up with their incessant chirping. I took all of this in stride seeing it as my inescapable lot in life and I really believed that I was no longer scared, until Mr. Camel Spider decided to remind me of his presence in this country. I was standing in my courtyard chatting on the phone with a fellow volunteer in the evening, minding my own business. I finished that call and was walking towards my door when I decided to stop on watch my two pet roosters settling in for the night. They always fight for their sleeping spot and it takes very little to amuse Ryan these days, but then as I watched them settle down I saw a massive something scurrying around on my courtyard wall at a speed that only creepy crawly things are capable of. Good things just don't move like that. Remember the sun has set at this point so my visibility past the range of my lamp is pretty low. I really hoped it was just a large harmless insect, which do in fact exist and I have watched Eustace (that's my rooster's name) eat them anytime they are foolish enough to wander into his presence, but my foreboding grew when I saw this thing spend a lot of time right in front of Eustace's face and he made no attempt to eat it. I take a step forward and am confronted with this dense spider. I use dense because that just seems to be the most adequate adjective. It was about the size of my fist and all of its spidery parts where just thick, dense as it were. Its thick weird legs that came out of its body in a not inherently spidery way, and its thick thorax with its thick pinching biting mouth. Well I took one look at this thing and I realized I was in big trouble, it was making as if to burrow into my wall, which I absolutely couldn't allow because then I would never sleep again. I quickly retrieve my trusting insect killing spray, many a time has this spray saved me when a clean attack was impossible and might have resulted in their escape. Well I rush back and it's still on my wall, I prepare to dodge it's inevitable death throes and let it have it with my death spray. Well not only does this spray not seem to have any sort of deadly affect on the little devil spawn, it also really pisses him off. So much so, in fact, that it decided to leap off of the wall right at my lowered face. Well I let out this noise of sheer terror (Jeremy, if your reading this it was the same noise that you made when that brown recluse almost got your hand) and leapt out of the way. I was terrified, but also knew that I couldn't let this pissed off spider escape me so I proceeded to chase it around my courtyard while continuing to hit it with this death spray, it had to work eventually right? Well I never got to find out because about five seconds into my ridiculous looking chase scene my can of spray ran out at so the wrong time. So now I am chasing this thing around trying desperately to prevent its escape and to herd it near my pile of flip-flops so that I could acquire a weapon to finish this beast. I finally manage to make it change its course to my terrace with flip-flops and I immiedietly grab the nearest one and slap the dickens out of this massive and enraged spider. It bounces into the air with the force of my slap and it sits motionless on the concrete, I pause, and then assure myself that it must be dead, but it seems reasonably intact..well that works out for me, now I can snag a sweet photo of this bad boy that should accurately convey the terror that I had to deal with. Feeling that the danger was past I gave it a little nudge with my weapon and it immiedietly began crawling up the flip-flop towards my hand faster than I would have ever imagined for a zombie spider. I give out another Jeremy noise and launch my flip-flop into the wall and turn to quickly grab another one for round two. I look over and two of the spider's legs are trapped under the flip flop and it is spasming around trying to get free so I only have seconds before it's on the move again. This time there is no mercy in me, I destroy that thing with my other flip-flop. He gets like 6 solid slaps before I am content that he is dead. At this point I hear someone knock at my door so I cruise over to open it up and it's my neighbor's daughter holding my escaped chicken (I also have a pet chicken) and I thank her for returning it once again and then figured I would practice my French a little in conversation so I'm like "I just killed this massive spider, it was terrifying" and she gives me this quizzical look and I assume she might not know the word for spider in French yet (she is one of my students and people in Burkina don't learn French until grade school so if they're younger they typically only know their local language or some hybrid of the two) so I beckon her into the courtyard and direct the light of my lamp onto the awful remains of my battle. At this time her face brightens and she says "oh you said [insert Moore word for spider], those aren't scary" she then proceeds to just barehand this carcass and chuck it out into the bush. "Why would you be afraid of that?" she adds as she moozies on out of my courtyard laughing. Rather embarrassing wrap up to my battle, but Burkina was in no mood to let me feel too comfortable out here. I told it that I was over my fear of bugs and it went "oh wait lemme send you this really chill spider". So now I have the full awareness that I will get to deal with these little devils out here and for the first time in my life I am considering getting a cat, not from any sense of affection. If it allows me to throw it at large spiders it can sleep in my courtyard, win-win. My next update should be a more encompassing idea of what life as a volunteer in my village is like, thank you all once again and stay curious.
Written 9/23/14
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