Common Cockroaches & Exotic Marsupials
We search for the perfect pet in Papua New Guinea.
I've been relieved (and disappointed) by the underwhelming amount of exotic bugs and animals we’ve seen, besides the Stone Fish from last post, which I didn't actually get to see myself. Still, we have had a few encounters of the animal kind.
Growing up and reading stories about missionaries in faraway lands, I thought that we would be beating off poisonous snakes and spiders as we stepped off the plane. So far the only menace around here was a land crab which darted out from under the table in the workshop and snipped off a chunk of my coworker's big toe. He was surprised to be attacked by a crab. I was surprised to find not all crabs live in the water.
Later we caught another land crab which was put in the chicken coop because a local guy told us that chickens like to eat them. I was a little concerned that the crab would eat the chickens but hey, they weren't my chickens so I had no qualms about trying it. The next morning the chickens were still in their coop. The crab was gone. Maybe it ran away. Maybe it was eaten. The results are inconclusive.
I've heard reports that on some islands there are coconut crabs that are large enough to severe your finger with their claws. Maybe someday I'll see one but so far no luck.
Locals like to try and sell missionaries any animal, plant, or object they think we may be interested in. There have been people at the gate trying to sell Cockatoos, Tree Kangaroos, crabs, Birds of Paradise, a Toucan looking thing, wooden carvings, fish, bayonets from WWII, and different varieties of orchids, just to name a few. Just start asking around for what you want and the word will spread in the community. You'll soon have entrepreneurs dragging exotic things out of the bush and onto your doorstep. I bought a few wooden masks that scared the children, but no animals yet. We're in the market for a nice bird though. I'll have to ask around and see what shows up.
We do have some pet cockroaches. I mean, we feed and house them so I guess we could consider them pets. We do have an antagonistic relationship, though.
Janice and I were sitting in the living room the other morning. I was sipping coffee and Janice was sipping Yerba Mate. This isn’t the weak kneed Yerba you’ll find in a hipsters cup at your local foofoo coffee shop. This is the Yerba that a grizzled outlaw who is living on the run in the Paraguayan jungle drinks from a cow horn covered in leather. It stands your taste buds at attention and then marches them right down your throat, despite their cries of anguish and horror, straight to your heart which they beat like a drum at a heavy metal concert.
Anyway, we were sitting there when suddenly a blood curling scream exploded from our bedroom, ricocheted around the walls of the living room, and disappeared behind the fridge, where most things in the kitchen go to disappear. Adi soon came stumbling out, rubbing her eyes, and blubbering incoherently.
She was sleeping on Oliver’s bed, which is a cheap foam mattress on our bedroom floor, because she had a bad dream. We have a deal with our children that they can’t sleep in our bedroom unless they have a bad dream, a policy that results in what I suspect are many flimsy and even fabricated claims of bad dreams. However, at 3am the will to investigate fraudulent claims is pretty low, let alone the desire to meter out any consequences. “Go shleep in Oliver’s bed,” I usually mumble through my pillow. This morning, however, sleeping in mommy and daddy’s room hadn’t saved her from something scary.
“Something crawled over me!” Adi sputtered her words through her tears.
Janice and I looked at each other. I laughed and Janice scolded me for it. “Poor child!”
We both knew what had crawled over her. Earlier that morning I went toe to toe with a cockroach in our bathroom, which is connected to our bedroom, just a hop and skip from Oliver’s bed. You would think that I would have an unfair advantage, what with my toes being much larger, but you’d be wrong. Various knick-knacks clattered to the floor. A shower curtain was dislodged. The little pest escaped under the bathroom sink and leered at me, waving his antennas to the tune of “Na Na Na Na Na.” Still, life must go on. I’d kill him next time I was sitting on toilet.
But apparently this cockroach followed me out of our bathroom to explore the big unknown. Imagine his surprise, then, when a mountain he summited suddenly sat up and shrieked! He must’ve thought it was a volcano. A few minutes later I found the culprit out scurrying around the hallway, probably in a state of shock. I smushed him twice and kicked him out of the door while his feet were still twitching. I didn’t even feel bad about it.
I used to be delighted when I’d find a cockroach because I’d feed it to our herd of sugar gliders. Sugar gliders are little flying marsupials that resemble flying squirrels. Janice calls them flying rats. They have a flap of stretchy skin on both sides of their body, between their front and back legs. They can spread their legs apart, stretching the skin into wings. It looks almost exactly like those crazy people in wing suits jumping off cliffs, if those crazy people also had eyes that protruded from their heads as if someone had squeezed them too tightly and popped their eyeballs out of their sockets. Sugar gliders can jump from high things and land on other things, like your head, in the blink of an eye and completely unannounced. It can be an unsettling transition to go from sipping coffee to having a marsupial in your hair without any time to get used to the idea. This is why we locked ours in a cage most of the time. That, and they also bite from time to time.
How did we end up with sugar gliders?
One day Chris, our Medical-And-Everything-Else-Director on base, asked me if he could give them to me. Imagine that, free pets!
“Our kids kind of grew out of them,” he said, which made sense to me. My kids were still young and interested in these things. Well, at the least, the kid inside of me was. I could have the cage, the feeding dishes, the whole setup. I agreed and the same day I found all the sugar glider paraphernalia on our back porch, along with four beady eyed little critters.
Apparently all the families on base had taken their turn wanting them and then getting rid of them. We were the unsuspecting new family. This should have been a red flag but I’m a sucker for exotic animals. At one point in my life I even considered being a veterinarian, until I found out it required schooling. Anyway, I was delighted with our new acquisition. My children were too.
At first we stationed them in our living room and occasionally I’d let one out of the cage. They would scurry around the house climbing curtains and bookshelves, with our children squealing after them, trying to catch them but horrified they would. One day a sugar glider jumped off the couch and onto Elliot’s head and then scurried down his body. Panic took control of Elliot’s large motor skills and was thrashing his limbs around like a cheap puppet. The sugar glider just dug his sharp little claws into Elliot’s calf and rode it like a bucking bronco. Elliot was a little gun-shy after that.
I soon found that “growing out” of sugar gliders takes about two months. Sugar gliders are nocturnal so they sleep during the day. You have a small window in the evening where they start waking up while you start going to sleep. Going to bed is in an inconvenient time for extra drama. They pooped and peed a lot and soon I realized how much fruit we were feeding the little freeloaders. They got moved outside. And eventually I found I was the only member of the family who was interested in them. And that was only because Janice would wait until I flopped down in bed, wriggled under the sheet, and sighed contentedly before she would ask, “Did you feed the sugar gliders today?”
During this time our language helper, Jeremy, had mentioned that he thought the sugar gliders were cool. One day I asked him, “Jeremy, would you like the sugar gliders? I’d give you the whole setup. Cage, feeding dishes, everything. And I’d even put them on a pickup and drop them off at your house for you.” Fortunately he said yes. I was eager to please.
While I don’t miss the sugar gliders at all, I do miss feeding them cockroaches. They love eating cockroaches and they tear geckos apart limb from limb. It’s a violent spectacle. Now I just kick cockroaches out the door like they’re trash, which is a waste of protein, if you think about it.
Spiders are also a waste of protein.
Adi has been carefully keeping track of the spiders in the house. I would too if, say, they were the size of tarantulas. But these are the smallest spiders you’ve ever seen, because if they’d be much smaller you’d never see them. But she doesn’t only keep track of them, she worries about them.
“Daddy, there’s a spider in the bathroom and it moved.”
“Ok Adi,” I’ll say, ankle deep in Tok Pisin, which is much as I can handle without losing my balance. If it was just water, being ankle deep isn’t a big deal unless it’s inside your kitchen or something. But Tok Pisin is like sticky tropical mud and being ankle deep in that is no small thing. Adi doesn’t care what my ankles are in, literally or metaphorically, so she keeps talking.
“Spiders are scary.”
“How big is it?”
She pauses then decides that’s an irrelevant question so she doesn’t bother answering. “Come kill it.”
“Adi, can I kill it later?”
“But Daddy, you said that yesterday.”
“Ugh. Why must I do it now?”
“Daddy, what if I need to go the bathroom?”
“I think you’ll be fine, I’d just go.”
Her worried look intensifies, which is a common reaction when you’re moments away from having a head on collision with something you don’t want to do.
I finally get up, grab a flyswatter, and pound every the corner of the bathroom with heavy artillery, which satisfies Adi immensely. She can finally go to the bathroom!
One day the kids were brushing their teeth in the bathroom. I was standing behind them like a drill instructor making sure no shenanigans occurred when out of the corner of my eye I saw something large and brown skitter from behind the door and across the floor, stopping right under the stool that Adi was standing on. I leaned over and looked from a safe distance. Sure enough, it was a large spider. If I was a chicken I’d be delighted to see a large snack but I’m not so my hairs involuntarily stood up so fast that a small breeze drifted through the bathroom.
“Adi, Elliot, quick get out of the bathroom.” I said, while pushing them outside the door. I didn’t want Adi to see the spider or she’d never go in the bathroom again.
“Just stay there,” I said, cool as a cucumber, holding my children back with one hand and swinging the toilet paper stand with the other. The spider, in what can only be described as a miraculous display of legwork, evaded my precision strikes and escaped through a dark hole in the tile under the bathtub.
Two weeks later Janice found it sauntering through our other bathroom and, once her voice returned to a pitch that was audible to humans, she politely asked me to kill it. Knick-knacks clattered to the floor. A shower curtain was dislodged. It didn’t get away this time and was struck down with vengeance in the middle of our shower, which is a convenient place to kill a large spider full of squishy spider juice.
Besides that one, which isn't around anymore, they're not many sizable spiders around the house. I think the large gecko population keeps the spider population in check. And I’d rather live with a hundreds of geckos than with a single large spider. In fact, geckos are so cute that we’ve been trying to catch one to keep as a pet.
If you think about it, geckos make perfect pets. They die quickly in captivity, which is great because I don’t want a pet that lives longer than my children's attention spans. They are also cheap! They’re all over my house, free for the taking. I was told that if you put a light in their eyes, you can catch them easily. So one night I took Elliot and Oliver, along with a few flashlights, and we chased geckos around the compound. After several rounds of the house, the geckos were all up near the eves, out of reach.
I guess the only pets we have left are the cockroaches.