Two weeks ago I decided to start the final assault on my house’s bat population. One of the four rooms has been locked for three months because even after the application of dubious nameless pesticides by my friends, the bats were refusing to leave. I put my bike in that room too, figuring it was the safest place in my house since the door was always locked. (I haven’t exactly been a cycling enthusiast here).
Every once in a while I would unlock the door just long enough to say, yup, there’s an ever growing pile of bat manure, and it still stinks of bat. Bats have a very pungent smell. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I moved in, my whole house stank of bat. It smelled bad, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. After lots of cleaning and cooking and living, the house finally just smells like me. But when I open that fourth room, the memory of my empty house floods back. Even the Peace Corps doctor, when I had pneumonia a few months ago, commented on it. After he came out for a site visit, he remembered the smell.
“Are you airing out your house?” he had asked, when he was starting my IV, “I remember your house had this weird, musty smell…”
So last week I got a new idea- to fight smell with smell. If the bats liked their acrid, musty smell in that room, then I would change it. First I sprayed some Doom in there. It wouldn’t kill the bats, but it stunk like hell. Then I sprayed a healthy dose of perfume, which made it sticky sweet. I forced open the creaky windows in the afternoons to try to waft in human smell. It started to work! I swept out the droppings every few days so that I could gauge if the amount was decreasing. The first sweep was dreadful. There were two dead bats on the floor, plus one that appeared in the last throes of death, convulsing whenever my (very long) broom touched it. The worst part? My bats have TAILS. Little spiky, inch-long black tails. Yuck.
This past Saturday I found another stinky weapon. I had bought Cobra floor polish when I moved in, because I had heard that well polished cement floors are easier to keep clean. I polished once or twice that first month, but now I barely even bother to sweep (terribly unsanitary by Malawian standards, I know). Cobra, ostensibly, “Lavender scented”, smells like commercial grade floor wax with a big cheap bottle of perfume mixed in. I smeared it liberally on the bat room floor. It did make the cement shine. And ever since, the bat droppings have decreased from handfuls per day to only a few pellets. Only the room still smells bad. Just Cobra-polish bad rather than bat-bad.
Stay away, you flying rats with radar, stay away.
Of course I had to take out my bike from the bat room before smearing the floor. And there was something about a brand new bike just sitting there, a little dusty but still shiny, that made me think, maybe I like riding bikes after all? Maybe I have gotten so much more in shape since I moved here that I won’t tucker out ten minutes from home? Oh yes, the bike was beautiful and Malawians ride bikes all the time. In fact, I was probably hindering my integration by NOT riding one.
I dug through my clothes until I found my tight black capris, and folded my chitenge in half so that all the last vestiges of forbidden thigh were covered. I threw on my helmet and sunglasses and wheeled out the door. The neighbor kids were playing outside, and they squealed in delight to see my bike. I hopped on and wobbled out to the dirt road. My neighbor, Nelly, was out there, chatting on Martha’s stoop. She looked really worried.
“Mukupita kuti??”- Where are you going?
“Sindikudziwa!” –I don’t know!
I rode past the Primary School in the direction out of town that I rarely took. In fact I had never been far this way except by car. I was surprised to see how quickly the landscape changed back to ‘rural village’. The trading centre where I had been doing most of my work really was a tiny oasis of development. I started huffing and puffing pretty hard. I was messing around with the gears but no matter what I did, pedaling seemed to get harder and harder. I had to stop several times, to the utter delight of the dozens of kids who had started running along side me. One of the times I stopped, I took off my sunglasses and tucked them into my chitenge. Of course as soon I started riding again, I heard a crunch, and looked back to see my sunglasses, which had managed to survive five months in Malawi, in three pieces. The lenses were ok though. I looked out at the kids and saw a girl, about five, who had a lazy eye. It was really profound- one eye looking straight ahead and the other gazing out sideways into the bush. I called her to come towards me but she freaked out and hid behind another girl. It took several minutes to get her to trust me, and I handed her the glasses. An older kid grabbed them out of her hand and I grabbed them back. I pointed at her.
“Basi,” -only her.
I got back on my bike and huffed and puffed for another 100 meters. The kids were keeping up now just by walking. Other bikes whizzed past.
That’s when I noticed that my tires were flat.
Because of course they were.
I turned around and tried to coast on the slight incline back into the trading centre. The bike wouldn’t even coast. The kids trotted along side me, lazy eye girl holding the glasses to her face, as I huffed and puffed to go downhill. Ten minutes later I was headed past my neighbor again. She stared at me, looking more worried than before. In the middle of the trading center is the bicycle repair district. There are two main shops equipped with pumps, scrap metal bits, homemade (literally) welders, and LOTS of men just standing around. Fortunately I was still going downhill, so I did my best to roll off the dirt road over onto the dusty space in front of one of the shops. These guys had never seen me on a bike before, and I was definitely the center of attention. There was a wide ditch between the road and the repair booth, and I barely made it up the far side when I put my feet down to dismount. But I was still on a slope, and my right foot didn’t make contact with the ground. I tipped over to the right, and rolled back down the ditch, bike over body.
Lovely, I thought, as my indecently-covered legs splayed out in an involuntary cartwheel.
I hopped up again as quickly as I could, and wanted to say something like TAA DAA! But I didn’t know the Chichewa words for that. So I just smiled like a dope, covered from head to toe in dust, in front of the completely silent mass of men. I picked up my bike and wheeled it over to the guy with the pump, pointing to my flat tires. He pointed at my elbow, which had gotten scraped up and was bleeding. I shrugged.
“Palibe vuto. Zoona.”- it’s no problem. Really.
He looked at my tire and said he didn’t have the right pump. Check the shop next door. So with all the eyes silently following me, I wheeled over ten feet to the other shop and presented my tires. A three-man team, including a young bike repair apprentice, was soon fixing my tires. The head guy asked, in skeptical, halting English,
“Who was it that taught you how to ride a bike?”
“Oh,” my mind was blank, “um, I think I learned in school.”
“Oh. Ok.”
My tires were full again and I asked what I owed him. He laughed and said no charge. So I hopped back on and thoroughly enjoyed the 50 meter ride back to my house, passing my neighbor for the third time, this time dusty, sweaty and bloody. Riding suddenly took a lot less effort. I thought about heading back out on the open trail, but the prospect of hot tea at home suddenly seemed a lot more inviting.
I decided to lock the door again to the bat room, to concentrate the smell of the floor wax. And for good measure I locked my bike away again too.
