Just Call Me Alice

10-7-10

I’ve decided that it’s time to sharpen my machete.

This revelation came about (as the majority of my most important revelations do) when I was talking to Joanna on the phone.  We had just finished our usual hour-long venting/gossip session, and hung up the phone to go to bed.  Five minutes later, I get another phone call from her.

“Emilie…I just killed a snake in my house and I am FREAKING OUT.”  Understandable.

Apparently, right after we got off the phone, she was walking through her living room to lock up and turn off the lights, when she noticed a frog sitting under a chair.  Deciding that there was no way Mr. Frog was going to spend the night in her comfy, cozy house, she went to get a broom to sweep him out.  That’s when she noticed the snake curled around the leg of the chair.  After what I assume was a moment when her heart literally skipped a couple beats (I don’t care if the doctors say it’s “not a physiological possibility”, they’ve never lived in the Salvadoran campo), she turned to get her machete.

And that’s when the lights flickered out.

I think God laughs at us volunteers, I really do. 

Fortunately, the snake wasn’t between her and her bedroom, so she started inching towards it for her flashlight and machete.  After a few heart-pounding seconds however, the lights came back on.  After retrieving her machete, she came back to the snake, who was perfectly position for the executioner’s axe.  His body was curled around the chair leg, but his head was sticking out.  Summoning the kind of cahones that I’m pretty sure I’ll never have, she managed to decapitate it with a few good whacks of her sharpened machete.  She swept the head out the door and called me, hyperventilating slightly.  (She apparently decided that if she didn’t get to sleep that night cause of the creepy-crawlies, I shouldn’t, either.)  She resolved to keep the body to show people the next day, so they could tell her if it was poisonous.  I advised her to take a couple photos and then sweep the body outside for the chuchos (dogs) to eat.  She wisely took my advice.

I know I complain about bugs and tarantulas and stuff a lot, but honestly, I think God only gives us what we can handle.  In her house, Joanna has found rats, lizards, frogs, scorpions, hordes of ants (that swept through one afternoon and ate the scorpions), bats, an owl, and now a snake.  I feel fairly confident that if I lived in her house, I would have early terminated a while ago.  All I can do is thank my lucky stars that the worst I’ve really had to contend with in my house are tarantulas and bats.

What kind of ridiculous statement is that?  I think I’m going to change my name to Alice.  Down the rabbit hole we go…