A Day In the Life

My parents are coming to visit today!! I was so excited that I came into town to meet them about 6 hours early- just in case. So I'm futzing around doing my taxes online and reading my email to find that my dear friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer sent me this email. I didn't ask her if I could post this... but hey you don't know her :) and she shall remain nameless.

In the words of a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer a day in the life:

Yesterday I found a rat burrowing in my remaining supply of tampons. God has forsaken me. I decided it was time to clean my room (it was more than time, your clean room actually prompted me to do this) and I opened up my suitcase that had been stored under my bed. I saw the damn rat, screeched, and slammed the suitcase shut again. Of course my whole host family comes running (the 10 or 11 that were in the house) and my brother chases the poor rat around the house WITH A BROOM until he smacks it to death. The dead rat was promptly offered to the neighbors cat and when the cat declined, my brother put the rat on my brother Daniels head. This set off another round of screaming. We opened the suitcase to see what kind of damage had been done and my tampons had all been pulled out of their plastic and fluffed out into a nice bed. OK, people here don't use tampons, they use weird uncomfortable pads, so everyone was discussing what these things were. Several people even suggested they were candy. CANDY?? What the hell? Anyway, it was mortifying because I was trying to shut the suitcase as fast as possible but my sister found the tampon instructions and of course the accommodating people of OB included instructions in Spanish. Dear Lord. She read for a few seconds while I was removing the rest of the stuff from the suitcase, and then started whispering with my other sister. Ugh. Anyway, while I was rummaging through the suitcase, I also found a number of peppermint patties that the rat had stolen from me and dragged into its new house. Man, those things are priceless here! As my family continued to mill around, I was forced to pull out all the birthday presents that they had given me (and that I was obviously treasuring). I had to pretend like I still really wanted to save the teddy bear covered in rat poop or my host brother would have his feelings hurt. Sick. I briefly considered just taking the whole thing outside and burning it. In the end, I lost my tampons, a shirt (which now has a large hole, this time made by a rat as opposed to Abercrombie), some chocolates, one power bar *tear*, a stuffed animal *pretend tear*, and some fake meat (I didn't particularly want to eat that anyway).

This issue with the rats prompted me to look deep within myself and decide it was time to perhaps keep a less-cluttered room. Also, no more Mr. nice guy, I'm buying rat poison.

To top off my unfortunate day, when I was sorting my food I found that the heat had ruined my one remaining jar of peanut butter. It wasn't even open yet!

Such is my life here in Peru. *Breaks down sobbing* No, thankfully, I found the whole day pretty amusing. I just continued to tell myself that this was something I could look back on and laugh about when I am in the States and I store things in closets instead of suitcases and there aren't rats in my house (my 100 cats will prevent that problem).