Rat Attack! And My Where Abouts.

It’s 5am on a Friday morning, my teammate and I have woken up early to wish a farewell to our teammate and supervisor Rita as she heads off to facilitate medical team in Mali. I can still hear the engine of 4x4 backing out of our gate, but I also hear another rumbling coming from in the kitchen or perhaps a rustling. I slowly swing the door open and flip on the light, yes there is a good bit of noise coming from above our food cabinet. This cabinet is high with about a foot of space between the top and our drop down ceiling. I stare at the top waiting… at this point I am more curious than anything… “How could a little mouse be making such a big racket?” Cue Jaws music. The scratching seems to be getting louder (as well as the Jaw’s theme playing in my head), that’s when I notice the hole in the ceiling just above the cabinet. “Maybe the mouse is still in the attic and the empty space is magnifying the sound.” Jaw’s music starts to recede a little as I comfort myself with this conclusion… but not for long, the music reaches it crescendo as the largest rat I have ever seen in person makes his debut by jumping on to the wall above the cabinet, apparently in an attempt to run back into the ceiling but he failed and hid behind the cabinet. I may have screamed like a little girl, I don’t really have much memory of the horror of those few moments but I do know in short time my teammate, Alex, and I were banging things around the kitchen listening to the monster “scurry” (if that adjective can be used to describes the movements of a 6 inch behemoth) behind all our dish cabinets, around the room. I could tell by Alex’s nonchalant attitude that she believed I was exaggerating the size of the creature, at one point we could hear the thing inside our stove (a favorite hiding place for our little mice friends), Alex suggested we light the stove and sweat it out. Lighting the stove requires reaching all the way inside the stove to light the starter at the back; clearly she was not understanding the vastness of the critter. I persuaded her not to do that and soon we could hear him making his way back towards the food cabinet. Alex froze in fear and exclaimed, “O my Gosh!” as she got her first glimpse of the monster squeezing back through the hole in the ceiling. “I told you! I knew you didn’t believe me!” “No I didn’t,” was her only reply. We stuffed a metal sponge in the hole in the ceiling and went back to bed to stare at the ceiling and imagine the rat laughing in delight at our faces when he made his escape.

The next night was a repeat of the first; somehow the rat was back, sponge still in place, and was having a party behind our cabinets. I grabbed a broom and Alex and I began to bang each cabinet and listen to the beast lumber around the kitchen. This went on for 45 minutes or more, things started getting hot when Alex did succeed in lighting the stove to sweat him out and the rat realized our malicious intent. Finally we got him out of the kitchen and into the more open corridors of our hallway. He made a mad dash for Rita’s Foot Lockers stacked almost to the ceiling. The Rat climbed the tower and began flinging himself towards the ceiling about a foot and half in the air, like a flipping Kangaroo! This was too much to even be horrifying anymore, Alex and I looked at each other in bewilderment and started to chuckle. We eventually got him cornered in the garage hallway and realized neither of us was man enough to do the job. So I ran out to find a real man, our night guard Dawda, I tried to mime that there was a grotesquely large rodents in our house but apparently my charade skills are not up to pare. I don’t think he had a clue what he was in for until we were all screaming as he was bludgeoning the rodents. As the thing lay there twitching around and doing a pretty dramatic job of dying, I could see Dawda trying not to laugh at Alex and my reaction.

As I wiped up the puddle of rat blood with a Clorox wipe, I couldn’t help but contrast this experience with my experience of the last three weeks. Less than a week ago I was walking on white sand beaches, taking pristine taxis around and chatting with P@stors about their work in the beautiful Island country of Cape Verde. This life is crazy. Since I moved to Africa in April of this year, I have been through 8 different countries and used 9 separate currencies.

This is what my schedule has looked like over the past 6 months:

April 17th – South Africa, Jo-burg. Layover.
April 18th-May 18th – Zambia, Lusaka & Base Camp. 40/40/
May 19th - South Africa, Jo-burg. Layover.
May 20th-23rd – Dakar, Senegal. Getting Visa.
May 24th-June 5th- Guinea, Conakry & Kankan. Volunteer team to Kankan.
June 6th-17th – Sierra Leone, Freetown, Bafodia, & Koidu. Research trip.
June 18th-28th, Guinea, Conakry & Forecariah.
July 1st-17th Liberia, Monrovia, Ganta, Voinjama, & Robertsport. Research Trip.
July 18th-19th Guinea, Forecariah & Conakry
July 19th-21st Senegal, Salle. Cluster Meeting.
July 22nd-29th Mali, Bamako. Packing Alex house.
August 1st-12th Guinea, Forecariah & Conakry. VBS with PBT.
August 13th-15th Sierra Leone, Freetown & Bo. Research Trip.
August 16th-31st Guinea, Forecariah.
September 1st-17th Mali, Bamako & Lakamane . Food Distribution.
September 18thh-29th Guinea, Conakry & Forecariah.
September 30th- October 22nd Cape Verde, Santiago, Sao Vicente, Santo Antao, Fogo, Brava, Sal, Boa Vista and Maio. Research Trip.
October 23rd Back in Forecariah with the mice!


If you have had trouble keeping up with where I am in my blogs, I have had trouble keeping up with where I am too. A majority of this travel, except when we went to Cape Verde and Senegal has been done in our 4 x 4 trucks. Our theme song has been, “On the Road again!” for a while now, and I can’t help but belt is out whenever we crank up the engine to the truck. When I took the position with the company I thought I would be helping to facilitate volunteer teams in Mali West Africa but the coup threw a kink in that plan and left my team starting over from the ground up. Some volunteer teams are continuing to come to Mali despite the risk of the ongoing unrest in the area and we are overjoyed by their commitment and courage to bring good news even in adversity. My team will continue to be involved in facilitating teams coming through Mali (thus Rita’s recent trip) but we have been give the amazing opportunity to research and begin new work in three countries that presently have no representatives from our company. It has been some adventure traipsing through each of these countries, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde trying to assess the “lostness” of each of the people groups. We still have a bit of a road ahead of us before we can settle in (hopefully to Liberia in January) and begin putting ideas, dreams and plans into action in these locations but I can feel the end of this constant motion in the near future. Please Pr@y for my team’s future in West Africa and for G0d’s vision for these nations to become apparent to us.

Over the next few days, I will be updating the blog on mine and Rita’s adventure in Cape Verde as we visited 8 of the 9 inhabited Islands of this beautiful country