Fixing the fixer…

When I was a little girl my mom was bit and badly injured by a brown recluse spider that came home with my dad in a banana box he was using to carry the groceries.  She had to go to the hospital and had a blood transfusion.  Even though I was way too young to remember this event it instilled in me a fear of spiders I have spent most of my life trying to overcome.

After securing the little apartment “casita” for the following 3 weeks we started to unload Moby.  I should say Fritz and two men we hired started to unload the truck, while I killed spiders.  Armed with bug spray that I am sure was made illegal in the US after the movie “Silent Spring” made our country aware of the dangers of insecticide, I ran around spraying every corner, nook and cranny.  I am sure that I killed thousands, well at least hundreds, ok there were at least 10 corpses of spiders.  These aren’t the small little wood spiders or even the daddy long legged variety, these were big black or brown hairy spiders as big as my palm.  I know many of you are disgusted with my behavior, and are thinking I should have let them live like Charlotte, and to that I say, re-read the first sentence and if they were in the barn they would still be alive, they were in what was becoming my house.  I was also relieved that first night that the electricity came on, we still didn’t have water, we were using our camp stove but the lights stayed on all night long as we slept on our mattress on the floor, with our sleeping bag liner completely zipped up, encircled by a perimeter of insecticide and at one point I almost killed my husband by running one of the clip on deet fans aimed at our heads (turned it off after his wheezing got really bad).

The next morning before the sun was up (but after I had already gotten out of bed escaping my nightmares of spiders) Rafael was there to hook up our water.  Water in Guatemala is pumped by the city (San Pedro de la Laguna) every few days into holding tanks, in our case it is then pumped from the holding tank in the back yard to the holding tank on roof.  We had to wait for the city to fill the first holding tank before we could get water into the house, and unfortunately that wouldn’t happen until later in the afternoon, so for another day we were without water.

Adjusting to the latest setback Fritz got started on the back yard cutting the grass with one of the men who had helped us carry down our things from the truck the day before. 

After about an hour of work, this guy showed up and the whole process went much more quickly.

Around one that afternoon the outside was done the helpers were sweeping out the spider webs from the ceiling and off the walls and I left in search of a mop and a bug bomb.  It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t find either in San Pedro, here I was quick to learn, you don’t use mops, instead you cut a whole in a towel put it over a broom and get it wet.  Also, there are no bug bombs only spray insecticide, so Fritz now spends every evening (and some mornings) killing any spiders brave enough to come out where I can see them and most days I go around in the morning, spraying the dark places of our house just to keep them out. 

Other than that, we have settled in quite nicely to our little house, and we love the convenience of a stove, a bathroom and having a place to stay, almost as much as the dogs love the back yard where they chase lizards during the day and toads at night.