Hey all!
These last two weeks have mustered up a multitude of emotions I didn’t even know I had, plus all the regular ones… it’s been trying and challenging, extraordinary and wonderful all at the same time. The Intervarsity team has come and left, and now a team mostly from CU Boulder is here. Our friends Brianna and Julie are living at our house now, and we’re making preparations for Shane, Ian, and me to leave this week (I leave for London on Thursday to see my Mom and sister this weekend, then to Macedonia with my sister for two weeks, and then back to Uganda.) All the leaders have split up to lead different people on the teams to different projects everyday, so Susan and I have hardly been together all week. It’s been weird not being with her all the time, but our different projects have been so important these last few weeks.
I’ve mostly been doing work projects at the house for all our kids, and we took on the biggest project of them all this last week. Remember when you were little and your parents told you “don’t let the bed bugs bite” when they were tucking you in? I don’t think I ever understood that bed bugs were a real thing, until I found out that they attack all our kids every night. They are little, hard-shelled bugs that live in the wood of their bunk beds and lay eggs in their mattresses and clothes. Well, this week the CU team decided to put some of their project money into debugging, and bleaching the entire house. It was the hardest, frustrating, most disgusting work I’ve ever done, but I’ll spare you and won’t go into too many gruesome details about it.
During the ridiculous two-day process a pretty disheartening realization made its way to the forefront of my mind, and I think it will stay here for a while. On day two we took all the sheets off all the foam mattresses, and lined them up outside the house. We had the goal of getting rid of all the eggs and remaining bed bugs that had made their way deep into the foam, so we don’t just throw a bug-infested mattress back onto all the bunk beds we treated. Julius, one of the house-dads told us to wipe boiling water over the surfaces of the mattresses, but then Margaret, one of the house-moms said we needed to put doom (the poison that kills the bugs) on the mattresses too, and then Moses another house-dad said we just needed to douse the entire mattress with boiling water, and all the guys on the CU team wanted to put all the mattresses in the garage and doom bomb them.
Each option has their set-backs… If we boil the foam mattresses they won’t dry for days and it will be a pot of boiling water for every two beds, we have thirty beds to do, it will take 45 minutes to boil each pot, and we still might not kill all the bugs. If we “doom” the mattresses it’s 100 percent poison, and the kids won’t be able to sleep on them for weeks, but it should kill all the bugs. If we just wipe boiling water over the surfaces we won’t get the eggs that are buried in the mattress, but we might kill some of the ones on the surface, and it won’t take as long to dry, but it could just be a waste of time… I was about to scream…
“So what’s going to work, tell me what needs to happen so this will work, I don’t care about how much money it will cost… just tell me how to fix it.” I said, trying to stay calm, but knowing my frustration was blatantly apparent. Julius stared at me not knowing what to say. “No solution is coming right now.” He said shyly. And that’s just it, me and my American-ness would love for there to be a solution, especially one I could just pay for and then magically it would all go away. But Africa doesn’t care what I want… even if we bought all new mattresses, and all new bunks the bed bugs will come back, and we’d just waste more money. No matter what we did this week, the bed bugs will come back in a few months, no matter what we did this week, there will be more rats, and no matter what we did this week the mold will come again, the house will get trashed and disease will spread.
I really hate this cycle, and I hate being powerless to stop it. As I took a cold shower in the dark that night, because our town’s power went out, I cried. I let the cold water wash away the doom that stained my skin, and cleanse my poisoned spirit. Because it does mean something that at least for a few months our kids won’t be getting bit by bed bugs, that their feet won’t be nibbled on by rats, and that every time we completely clean the house top to bottom it stops the mold and disease at least for a while. We’re going to start doing hygiene classes with the kids and the house-mom’s to hopefully get to the root of the problem, and there is hope in that, whether or not we are immediately successful. I just have to choose to see that hope every new morning, and every time I go to bed frustrated and discontent. Even if we completely fail… I’d rather fail fighting for them, fighting against ignorance, fighting for changed lives, than fail because I cynically sat around and did nothing because I thought it didn’t matter… So I have to make the most important decision of my life everyday… deciding that it’s worth it.
Love and miss you all,
Nicole
