That Pitter Patter of Tiny Feet isn’t Children…

4-22-11

There’s a mouse in my house.

Okay, so there’s probably more than one. But saying that “there’s a mouse in my house” has a more pleasing symmetry to it than “there are mice in my house”. And it scares me less to imagine one rogue mouse scurrying around at night, rather than a whole herd of them scavenging for tasty scraps of dust and plastic bags.

I’ve suspected for some time that I might have critters, but I kept trying to tell myself that those suspicious rustlings at night were coming from outside, or that those gnawed on plastic bags were just from really big bugs. (Don’t laugh; you haven’t seen the size of the bugs here.) But last week, the suspicious rustlings were louder than ever, and I was pretty sure they were coming from the direction of my dry foods basket. I shone my flashlight across the room and sure enough, I was just in time to catch a furry little body scamper down from the basket and disappear.

I gave myself a moment or two to quietly freak out underneath my mosquito net. Then I got out of bed, turned on the light, and set to the task of gathering all my foodstuffs into a bag and hanging it from the ceiling. You know, like you do when you’re camping and you don’t want bears to get your food. (Personally, I think I’d actually prefer Yogi the bear to Mickey the mouse, but God didn’t consult me on this one.) Once my food was (more or less) safe, I got back in bed. Of course, that didn’t stop the mouse. That bold little bugger was running all over my house for the rest of the night: on my empty food basket, on top of my refrigerator, on the floor, and I swear, I even felt him trying to climb the mosquito net at the foot of my bed. Ten points to me for not deciding to move back to the States after that.

Fine. The truth is, I’ve never been the best housekeeper. Alright, that’s a wild understatement. I’m a really messy person; that’s just who I am. My living space, whether it was my bedroom at home, my dorm room at college, or my house here, has always been covered in stuff: stacks of books, piles of papers, and heaps of clothes. The only person it’s ever really bothered is my mother (sorry, Mom). But as it turns out, in El Salvador, being a messy person means that those stacks of stuff are just little bunkers for mice to run around and hide behind, while they become increasingly bold in their excursions.

So. Mouse-destroying options, anyone? I could have bought rat poison, but then the mice would have just curled up and died in the walls and on the roof, and stunk to high heaven. I could have bought a mouse trap, but the only kind they sold here was the kind that literally decapitates the mouse, making my home look like the scene of a slasher flick, in miniature. I also could have gotten a cat, but I hate cats, and it would have probably knocked over and broken most of my stuff in an attempt to catch mice.

In the end, I went with none of the above. I decided that I would just have to make my home as uninviting to mice as possible, which meant a slight change in lifestyle for me. Gone were the messy piles of stuff. I threw out all my plastic bags, which were sitting in the bottom of one of my plastic racks and not being used except to provide cover for midnight mouse excursions. I moved everything I owned outside, and swept and mopped my whole floor, even behind my fridge and under my bed. I reorganized the plastic racks, wiping down everything with the strongest cleaner I could find, and throwing out all the stuff I knew I’d never use from them.

It’s sort of worked. I’m definitely hearing the pitter patter of little feet on my floor less, but now I’m occasionally hearing them up in the rafters of my roof. That’s pretty common here; most of the volunteers I know have mice that run around on the rafters at night. Hopefully they stay up there don’t get any bolder than that. But if they do, my neighbors have promised to loan me their cat for a couple of nights, to take care of my resident rodents. And if that doesn’t work…

Well, for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to assume that that’ll work.