Yipes! What was that?

I have had to get used to a lot of creepies and crawlies living here in Angola.  I come from Michigan, where we certainly have bugs and spiders and stuff, but, you generally only see them in summer, and even then, they are mostly outside.  Even in China and Latvia, where I lived previous to Angola, the creepy crawly issues were not that bad.  Of course, in Angola, there are bugs and spiders and all sorts of other crawly things that I have had to get used to.

The most benign of these is the gecko.  As far as I know gecko don't spread any disease or filth, they don't want to get into MY food, and they don't multiply at the rate that other creepy crawlies seem to.  I actually have a soft spot for geckos because they eat other bugs- most notably those nasty malaria-spreading mosquitoes!     

That said, they still scare the crap out of me now and then!  When you walk into a room that you know should be empty and you see movement out of the corner of your eye, it's scary!  That exact thing happened this afternoon as I walked into the bathroom. There was a gecko on the wall of the bathroom that skittered away from the door when I walked in.  Yipes!  Made me jump!

Tonight, as I was sitting in the bedroom rocking and nursing my daughter at bedtime, I saw a dark shape above the closet, where the wall meets the ceiling.  The room was darkish- too dark to read, too dark to see whatever that black thing was, but light enough to basically see the shape of everything in the room- it was dusk.  I sat in the rocking chair staring at this black shape for a few minutes- I wondered if I was seeing things, if I was imagining that it was moving, if my eyes were playing tricks.  Then, I thought to myself, "What if it's a giant nasty cockroach?"  It wouldn't be the first time I came across one of those in the bedroom, and I would not want to let it be, if it was a cockroach.  So, I got up, turned the lights on, poor little groggy Beni squeezing her eyes shut against the unwelcome brightness. 

Of course, as soon as I turned the lights on little mister gecko kept moving off into the corner.  I let go of the breath I'd been holding, and turned the lights back off.

I will say, I don't like living with bugs.  Like I said, the geckos I don't mind.  The spiders even I leave be, because they also eat other bugs including mosquitoes and fruit flies.  The cockroaches and the mosquitoes and the ants though... I could do without them!  But what can you do... these bugs are part and parcel of living in Africa!  I just wish they wouldn't take me by surprise so often...