While I’m in the spirit of telling you about the wonderful four-legged friends I’ve made in Uganda, I figured I’d introduce you to a couple more. The first pair came to visit me when I was still living with my host family in Masaka back in May. The room I lived in was a very basic 8x10 foot room with a bed, a small desk, and hooks on the wall for my clothes. And that’s it. I basically lived out of my bag for four months, and just got used to it. It’s really not that bad. But anyways … all that to say, there wasn’t much in my room. My bed was in one corner of the room, and in another corner, I noticed a little hole that looked like it had been dug through from the outside, with a small pile of dirt to show for it. But I didn’t think much of it, and went to bed.
As I was falling asleep, I heard some scratching along the floor, but again, didn’t think much about it. There are always geckos along the walls and floor, and often you can hear mice (or something) up near the roof, so this wasn’t much different. But then I heard something right below my bed, and then heard footsteps next to my ear, and in fact felt a bit of pressure on my pillow. So I sat straight up, grabbed my flashlight, and shined it down on my pillow. And sure enough, a little mouse was trying to get cozy with me, and that just wasn’t gonna happen.
It went a kind of “deer in the headlights” for a second, and then ran back down my bedpost to the ground. I jumped out of bed, partly freaked out by the mouse, and partly determined to figure out what the heck was going on. This is what I’m thinking: “First of all, I don’t even have food in my room, so what does he want? There’s plenty of food other places for him to get, so why is he here? Secondly, WHY is he on my bed, and HOW the heck did he get up here? Ahhhhh!”
I looked under the bed with the flashlight (keep in mind that there was no power, so I didn’t even have the option of turning the light on in my room), and I saw not one, but two mice. My little snuggle-buddy-wannabe had a friend! But as the light hit them, they booked it for the corner of the room with the hole in it, but I beat them to it. So they sprinted back along the wall under my bed, and then back again. The good part about all of this was that I didn’t have so much clutter in the room. The bad part was that the mice were running right through the part that was cluttered, with my bags, shoes, books, and papers on the floor, so they had plenty of hiding places as I tried to chase them around. Eventually, I decided I would just lead them to the hole in the corner and get them out of the room, and they left. Perfect. I can sleep in peace now, right? Wrong.
I moved my bed out from the corner of the room so that it wasn’t right up against the walls. I moved my pillow to the other side of the bed (after flipping it to the other side, the non-moused side). I held my headlamp tight in my hand. I laid my head down on my pillow and listened attentively for any slight sound of movement. I waited. And I waited. And then I heard movement and I knew they were back. So I jumped out of bed again, grabbed a shoe, and turned on the flashlight. Sure enough, the mice twins were back. This episode wasn’t quite the saga from before, as I chased them a bit, and then shooed them out of the room again. So I crawled back into bed again and waited. And waited. And waited. …
And all of a sudden, it was light outside, and morning was here. I quickly looked around and noticed that I didn’t have any visitors on the bed with me, and I gave a sigh of relief. That day, I went ahead and filled in the hole they had dug, and placed some things in front to try to block them from coming in again. Of course, there was enough space between the door and the ground that they could easily crawl through there if they wanted, but I was hoping they would be scared enough to try somewhere else. And luckily enough, they did. For the last three weeks I was living with my host family, I had no more mice problems, and that was a very good thing.
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