Aw, RATS!

Yesterday I heard Elizabeth and Gaelin outside talking to each other.

“Oh, get it off him!” I heard Elizabeth say.
“The ants are hurting him!” Gaelin said.

I listened for a while and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I thought they were pretending something until Elizabeth ran to the kitchen window (I was working in the kitchen) and said “Mommy, there is a little baby animal out here that has fire ants on it and I think they are hurting it! Its a baby mouse or something.”

My ears perked up. A mouse? I know they have mice here but baby mice are so *small*. However, baby rats weren’t quite so small and were equally abundant.

I hurried outside and saw that the “baby animal” was indeed a baby rat. Ew! Gross! But I still didn’t have the heart to kill it. It was a baby, after all! James was gone but his Ugandan helper, Osbert, was working on some stuff in the unfinished part of our house. So I went to him.

“There is a baby rat behind the house and I can’t…..” I couldn’t finish the sentence – ‘kill it’. We’d just had a conversation a couple days before about women being too soft hearted. So I made some reference to that.

“I cannot do it, either.” he replied, with the same look on his face that I knew was on mine – knowing a task needed done but not having the heart or the desire to do it because it just seemed distasteful.

So he went around to the back of the house where Elizabeth and Gaelin still were and picked it up between two sticks and took it and threw it in the road. The deed would be done, whether by the ants or by a vehicle, but not by one of us.

Later that evening, I heard the neighbor’s dog outside our kitchen window again. There were actually two dogs out there and they had *another* baby rat and were playing with it – picking it up and dropping it over and over and it was squeaking and squeaking. Other squeaks were coming from somewhere in the sweet potato plants behind our house. Auuuugggghhhh! The night guard came over and asked if there was a problem so I pointed out the rat and he disposed of it in short order.

But I could still hear those squeaks – off in the distance – until late in the night – rats that are just waiting until they grow big enough so they can get in our house and really and truly freak me out.

Truth is, most of the squeaking I was hearing (and can hear tonight too!) was probably the geckos that chirp and squeak to each other and we encourage them to live in and around the house since they eat pesky bugs like roaches and mosquitoes and other bugs. Hopefully I’ll sleep better tonight than I did last night, though!