Let me tell you about the witch owl, another one of Liberia’s fantastic cryptozoological creatures.
The witch owl will sit outside your house making a terrifying squawking noise all throughout the night. If you hear it or worse see it you will be cursed. The witch owl will wait patiently until it can catch you and suck your blood. Many people who have been cursed by the witch owl have been found the next morning dead and completely drained of blood. Some people will only experience a curse on their house. It is best for these people to move from the house and live undisturbed elsewhere. There is one way to remove the curse: shame the witch owl! To do this a group of people must stand outside of the house naked. This will cause the villainous bird to become embarrassed and fly away to another unlucky house. When I visited my house before moving in I heard this story when asking around about a noise I heard during the night. This was definitely unnerving, especially the next night when I heard the noise again. Eventually I figured out that the noise was just dozens of frogs that were living in the bathtub behind my house (there is no tub inside the house and it is very common in Robertsport to have the tub outside to catch water). Despite this, there have been various events over the past months that have led me to believe that the house was cursed by the witch owl.
The past four months has been littered with plagues of spiders, cockroaches, mice and more! The first plague to occur was the plague of spiders. I have had so many unfavorable encounters with spiders that neighborhood kids have named me the Spider Woman! There are a lot of different spiders here. Some are gigantic but not poisonous while others are tiny but deadly. Some are so big and so quick that when they are scurrying across the walls you can hear all 8 steps sounding like someone typing an angry letter – I didn’t think that sound occurred outside of movies. For the most part I do not mind spiders. In fact when they are in their own environment, but of sight and away from me they are great. If a spider wants to live behind some shelves and eat mosquitos, great, do that, it will reduce my chances of getting malaria. However, when a spider makes it inside of my tent, the place where I sleep, read and believe myself to be guarded against all things small and terrifying then we have a problem. One morning I woke up with a swollen lip. I figured something must have bit me during the night telling from the two little dots on my lower lip so I decided to check my tent. When I pulled up the sheets from my bed a nasty looking spider crawled out from the edge of my bed. I exterminated that spider as a warning to all others to not enter my tent! After that first incident I compulsively checked the walls and corners of my tent every night before going to sleep. I would have probably been better off not checking, especially during the night, but I didn’t want to chance zipping myself up in a tent with something fatal. I have found two more spiders, quarter size, chilling inside my tent since then. I don’t know how they are getting in since I always keep my tent zipped. Right now my theory is that they have the ability to apparate into my tent. Stupid apparating spiders…go back to Hogwarts!
Other spider encounters include having a spider the size of my hand crawl onto my hand and up my arm. And once while riding in a cramped taxi I looked to the ceiling of the car just above my head and saw a HUGE spider sitting there. The car was driving on a dirt road that is full of bumps and pot holes and of course when we hit a big bump the spider fell and landed on my lap. I freaked out and brushed it off. My site mate, Laura, who is an arachnophobic, freaked out BIG TIME. I asked the driver to pull over, Laura screamed at the driver to pull over and the Liberians in the car were just laughing at us. The spider was not poisonous and would not harm us but we continued to ask the driver to stop the car and after what felt like minutes the driver pulled over, we got out of the car and attempted to brush away the hebejebes and locate the spider. We didn’t find the spider but to placate us the other passengers offered to change sides of the car to distance us from the spider. This worked out and we were able to continue our journey. Oh, spider don’t tread on me!
Cockroaches are the second plague that has descended on the house. They are everywhere despite cleaning and keeping things put away in containers (they find their way through anything…plastic is no barrier for them). They come with all sorts of different abilities (flying, jumping, running the speed of superman) and they come in different sizes and colors. If I am the spider woman then Laura is the cockroach woman. One night I woke up to her screaming. I rushed out of my tent to see what the matter was to find her standing in front of her partially zipped up tent. She had woken up to a cockroach crawling on the side of her face! When she realized what it was she leaped from her bed and through the small part of her tent that she left unzipped. I was able to trap the cockroach under a cup; I wrapped the sheets around the cup and then put the cup in the living room to deal with it in the morning. A few weeks later she found an “albino” cockroach while cleaning. I have been told that once you see an albino cockroach you know you have a problem because of how rare they are. Oh no!
Mice, the third plague, live in the maze they have created in the house’s mud walls. When the sun sets, and there is no light except for what the moon is reflecting off, the mice run around our house creating more holes in the walls and eating my student’s homework. Occasionally, the mice and the cockroaches have a nutcracker-esque battle for reign over the house. They both crawl around my tent, up my curtains, on my ceiling, all over my door and use the kitchen as their base. The noises they made would often wake me up or influence a crazy mefloquine dream. The worst so far was a dream where spiders were building webs above my head and Splinter’s evil twin was using his ninja skills to break down my tent while simultaneously fighting off cockroaches!! Ahh…luckily all that was a dream…
The most intense bug experience so far – the fourth plague – was around Thanksgiving. The day before I left my site for a training I was walking home from school and the path leading up to my house was covered with a 3 meter wide river of ants (seriously)! They were endless. I had no idea where they were coming from and there were just so many. I continued walking home a little dazed by what I just saw and glad that I was able to maneuver over/around them without too many bites.
A little while after getting home I went inside to make some food when my site mate, who is standing in the living room, asks me if I hear this crackling sound. I walk into the room unprepared for what I saw. The walls of the house went from looking normal to being alive. The walls and ceiling were moving with millions of ants! They were draping the walls and falling from the ceiling vining out from every crevice in the house. THERE WERE SO MANY ANTS!! I ran outside to see if the ants were on the outside of the house. Sure enough they were crawling up the outside walls by the bathroom to gain entry into the house. Right when I was really worrying about what to do a student passed by and offered to spray the little beast with spri-gone (insecticide). When the remains of the ants were put outside the chickens in the neighborhood flocked to feast. The chickens were happy getting a free meal but I felt like I was poisoning them. Your welcome, Tee-eh*, sorry-oh!
When I asked a few neighbors why this happened I was told that the ‘bush ants’ or termites were attracted to the wood** beams in our house. They followed the wood all the way from the bush and entered the house to take it back. To prevent any future assaults I was told to coat the wood with carboline, a thick, black, tar-like substance. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t any carboline in Robertsport and the wood hasn’t been termite proofed. So far, two months later, there hasn’t been a reoccurring incident but who knows when the bush ants will rise up again to retrieve their whood.
While my site mate and I have been working to sensibly pests proof the house we were not prepared for the fifth and hopefully final plague… rogues. While we were at a workshop in Gbarnga the house was burglarized. A few electronics and random things (stickers, checkers and nutella) were taken. Fortunately, after informing a few neighbors about some of the things that had gone missing they appeared mysteriously the next morning on the front porch. After reporting the incident to the local police we were picked up and taken to stay in the capital until certain improvements are made on the house. The community has responded to the incident very seriously and has attempted to get all of the remaining items back. The house will have new locks put in on the exterior doors as well as the rooms inside. Cement is also being added to the walls so that they extend all the way up to the roof. This will prohibit anyone from gaining entry through the ceiling. Hopefully with these new improvements and a few personal adjustments the house will become less accessible to theft.
If it was the witch owl that placed bad juju on the house I hope that after 4 months and 5 plagues the curse has run its course. Please witch owl, I beg, I hold yo’ foot, please leave this house alone!!
*Tee-eh is Vie for chicken
**wood is pronounced as whood in Robertsport Liberian English…reminds me of the Family Guy episode were Stewy sounds the H sound in whipped cream and Wil Wheaton…heehee
