Revisited

I just came back from a wonderful visit to Home of Hope, a children's home in the area. Most of my days were spent playing guitar (I am attempting to teach myself while I am here: I have 6 chords down!), reading, and waiting for the children to get home from school. Then the fun begins. The smallest girls seem oblivious to my obvious deficiency in speaking their language, laughing and giggling at me in Tamil, or Sinhala, I still can't tell the difference. I am slightly worried that, while playing with them in the playground, on the swing sets, they are screaming at me, "Stop pushing me! I am too high! I am scared of heights! I am peeing my pants!" to which I respond with my usual smile-as-big-as-I-can-because-I-don't-have-any-clue-what-you-are-saying and pray that I am not scarring these children for life.

This home's location in rural Sri Lanka afforded me the opportunity to become a little more acquainted with the insect/reptillian/creepy-crawly population of Sri Lanka. I have never really been scared of bugs, however, when I was a wee lad I vividly recall disobeying my parents by watching a TV version of the early 90s thriller, Arachnophobia. One particular scene became forever etched into my psyche and is responsible for my slight distaste for bugs: a legion of spiders had taken over the bathroom of some house, unbeknownst to an unfortunate patron of that bathroom. As he/she (I can't remember) showered, spiders crawled out of pipes in the shower head, toilet, faucets, to prey upon the unsuspecting bather. I thought this was great entertainment. But when I went to shower that night, I was keenly aware of every single hole and hide-away in which some killer arachnid may be waiting in ambush for me. For a week straight, I spun a perpetual 360 as I showered, bearing the sting of soap in my eyes to avoid missing the sign of a sneak spidey-attack. I performed a thorough examination of the toilet before every use, making sure that no poisonous webspinners were clinging to some under-visible underside, waiting to take advantage of my embarassingly vulnerable immobility. Fortunately, this paranoia gradually subsided.

My childhood fears revisited me this week.

Upon entering the bathroom to relieve myself (I seem to write a lot about bodily functions...) I noticed a big 'ole nasty cockroach floating in the bottom of the toilet. Paranoia flooding back, I tried flushing him down, to no avail. So, I proceeded in my initial task, very cautiously and awkwardly, while trying to keep an eye on the overgrown beetle. With the mission accomplished, I triumphantly flushed, making sure that this time, my roach friend slipped down into the watery depths of the sewer. However, as the flushed water flooded down the sides of the toilet, it carried with it another cockroach, who had been clinging to the underside of the toilet rim, knocked from his perch by the rushing water. Inches away from where I had been sitting. Sick. Nasty. I hate cockroaches.

So there you have it - there are some things that scare me... kind of.