When Vermin Come Calling

Bugs on steroids. I moved into a country with bugs that cannot be killed, and in return mock my mortality with noisy little bug fiestas.

Who knew that in the Highlands of Guatemala, with a dry season and rainy season comes a scorpion season. When the riverbeds get too wet, they seem to like a nice cozy house to wait it out until theirs dries out. We learned how to check our shoes before we slipped them on. The smaller one’s sting is worse than the larger ones. But in all the years we lived there, no one ever got stung.

There were two pros of having scorpions
1. They help develop keen shoe throwing skills
2. They spices up any girl sleepover, like scary stories times ten. You could hear the screams from the moon.

Lice. I have three girls, I’m no rookie to these critters, we go way back. But where we lived in Guatemala seems like all you had to do was walk outside the gate and the girls came home with head pets. Good news is that there is lots of good light in the tropics to pick through their heads. Bad news is that that our washing machine and the one in town didn’t have do hot water, our clothes drier only did cool air and there were no others in town, and we didn’t have a vacuum. Driers suck electricity and people dry their clothes au natural. The lice thank you for not being able to effectively practice insect-genocide.

This is how one head of lice becomes three.

You get the picture. Thank goodness they had lice shampoo. But the catch was that they sold it in little ketchup packets, seriously. The pharmacist dude would say you need one or maybe two for a whole head. Such comedians. We used twenty packets per head per treatment. Joy of joys. We started bringing
it down with us family economy sized bottles.

Luckily you can buy shower caps in Guate. We also found plastic garbage bags so the girls could at least have visual visitation with Pinky and the other stuffed animals.

Despite the lack of an effective vacuum, hot water to wash sheets and clothes in, a hot drier, we beat them. I beat them All you need is, lice shampoo, shower caps, and a whole lot of persistence.

But now let’s talk about the serious bad-asses of the world bedbugs. We had to deal with these when we moved to Florida. I went to box store and got bedbug spray, bedbug bomb, a guy came in to spray twice, we washed all the clothes in hot, dried them even hotter for an hour. Bugs gone. Even better, I now have a bug guy who has my back.

In Guatemala we had bedbugs while we were living in a house with a palapa (palm leave) roof. We had no place to buy pesticides that could kill a moose, no hot washer/drier one-two punch. I tried
everything to keep the kids from being a midnight buggy buffet. Even wrapping them in mosquito netting didn’t outsmart the creepy crawly Einsteins. Eventually I had to tuck my tail and wave the white flag. They won and we moved to a different house.

I wish I could design an adventure that was free of all the things I didn’t like, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’ll get back to you when I do. But until then, I’ll make sure to pack my bug defense bag.