The Fear Factor!

*Fear really makes you do crazy things and when you fuel the fire with an active imagination, it makes you seem crazy. I wrote this piece following an episode where fear had gripped my heart and was unwilling to let go:) I think I did a fair share of holding unto fear myself!

I have spent the whole day laughing at myself. It's amazing what fear can do, what on earth am I talking about you may wonder? Okay, ill tell you. But an explanation of our living conditions is necessary. My first night in the village was spent in a tukul with grass walls and a grass roof. One night in the tukul was more than enough for my overactive imagination fired by the story of an expat who had promptly packed his bags and gone back home after a snake dropped from the roof of his tukul onto him in the middle of the night.

My next nights were spent under the stars and I slept fairly well. With the onset of the rains and the pre-rain wind storms sleeping outside was abandoned and we moved into our storage room/office- the new female nurse and I. The only problem is that the roof leaks even after two repairs with strong rains waking me up because there is a steady stream of water trickling unto my bed. The nurse and I are a couple of scared cats each of us claiming to be stronger than the other. I am afraid of snakes and she is afraid of any creature smaller than her that movesJ

How does this relate to last night? Most nights depending on who is more afraid, we scan our room for the ever present rats and bats and other creatures our minds conjure, flashing our hand lamps every thirty minutes and calling out to each other to see if the other is asleep. I am painting a scenario that happens almost every night depending on who is not too tired to fall asleep. Last night I fell asleep really fast because I was tired. I woke up to the noise of some creature or creatures tinkling with metallic objects, I thought it was some human trying to be funny. I shone my horribly dim lamp to the broken window above my head through my mosquito net. Of course by this time my heart rate had increased a hundred foldJ

Before I knew what was happening some huge object/objects jumped through the broken window and landed beside me tenting my mosquito net. I scrambled out of my mosquito net screaming in a very loud voice, I called for the nurse who hurriedly assured me that all was well. I told her all the while shouting that someone had launched something through the window and that we needed to get out of the room now. Her cool voice changed into one of panic and before you knew it we had scrambled for the door in varying stages of panic. I shaking like a leaf and she calling for the men to come and save us from whatever it was that was bent on attacking us. We woke up the whole compound except the nightwatchman who slept through the whole episode.

I still cannot imagine I was that scared but days of imagining the worst- i.e having a snake show up in the bedroom probably spurred my mind to believing the worst. We (certainly does not include me) have killed 16 snakes in the last two months, 12 in the last couple of weeks. I had thought someone had launched a couple of snakes through my window! Ask me who would do such a thing? No one. Anyway it turned out that what I thought were snakes were actually a couple of big rats, the guys could only find one which somehow disappeared when it was spotted. I was the butt of all the jokes today . Amongst the patients and staff there was amusement that their doctor was scared of ‘rats’ jumping on her. ‘only rats’ was the common expression. Apparently sweeping off lizards and rats which jump on your chest while you are sleeping is nothing to be worried about.

As you can imagine I did not sleep till morning, thankfully we had for the first time yesterday access to the Internet so I spent the next few hours browsing and catching up on my back mail. I am still laughing as I write but I can imagine that I'll be the butt of jokes for weeks to comeJ