Carlitos

So I walk into the house on Sunday night after a great afternoon of The Real World Cancun (stop judging me) and Skype, to find Aguchita and a few of her friends gathered around the table enjoying their weekly game of cards. We all made small talk as I headed for the refrigerator looking for something to hold me over until dinner. I grabbed three mini-mangos (that’s not what they are really called, I just call them that because they are fun-sized) and stood by the counter to eat them. I was working on mini-mango number three when a baseball-sized black object nearly hit me in the head. I looked up annoyed to see a small bird fly towards the far wall in the living room. It had entered through the front door (which is almost always left open) and now struggled to find its way out of the house. The bird swooped in a panic as it bumped into doors and walls. Aguchita and her friends didn’t look up from their card game.

“Umm…Aguchita? Yeah…theres a bird in the house.”

After taking a few seconds to finish drawing and discarding, Aguchita barely turned her head to look at the bird.

“That’s not a bird, it’s a bat.” She said flatly, returning to her game.

I waited for the plan as to how we were going to get it out of the house, but nobody said anything. I waited for Aguchita to put the cards down and grab a broom, but she must have had a really good hand. I ducked a couple times as I waited for somebody to be as alarmed about the animal in the house as I was, but it was as if I had informed them that there was a fly or a moth in the living room. No big deal. I wouldn’t have been as concerned about the bat as I was, but I had a feeling that this nervous bat was going to somehow make its way into my room. I could just feel it. I watched as the bat discovered the gap in between the wall and the ceiling and crawled into one of the extra rooms of the house. My heart was still racing but the room was two away from mine so I felt pretty safe. I told Aguchita where the bat had gone and she told me that it would probably find its way outside from there, but that I should turn on the lights in the room just to be sure it would leave. I flipped the lights on in the room that the bat was in and ran to turn mine on too - just to be safe.

After dinner I went into my room and crawled into my bed to finish the movie I had started the day before. I laid in bed with my laptop in my lap when I heard a little squeak off somewhere in the room. I wrote it off to the geckos on the walls when I heard the noise again. I looked up to the corner of my mosquito net to find the source of the squeaking. My friend the bat, the man of the hour, Mr. Nervous Circles Around the Living Room himself, had nestled himself in the corner of my mosquito net four feet away from my head. He glared at me with a smirk as if to say, “thought I couldn’t make it to your room, huh?” I will spare you the words that came out of my mouth next, but I will say that my heart stopped for a second. I knew that as soon as I moved my little visitor would feel threatened and begin swooping around my mosquito net, which would surely kill me or at least leave me seriously injured. Because that’s why humans avoid bats - we don’t want to be swooped to death. I set my laptop aside and slowly began to inch towards the end of the bed on my back, not taking my eyes off of the bat. He stared back, confident in his decision to enter my net, knowing that I would be the first one to retreat. When I finally made it close enough to the entrance of my net, I slowly lifted the nylon and slithered my way down out of my bed and onto the floor. I stood up and realized that I hadn‘t taken a breath in like two minutes. I walked into the living room anxious to tell my heartbreaking story to anyone who would listen. Aguchita was in the shower, but I found her cousin Sarita in Aguchita’s bedroom.

Pictured: Sarita, my host aunt and partner in bat extermination

“That bat is in my mosquito net.”

“What bat?”

“The bat that was flying around here earlier. Its in my mosquito net and it looked at me.”

“No. Bats can’t get into those nets, that’s why we use them. Its probably just a big moth.”

Yeah Sarita, it’s a moth. Silly me always mistaking moths for bats.

“No, I am sure it’s a bat. Please come and look.”

Sarita followed me into my room. I stood in the doorway and told her to stick her head into my net and look up.

“Oh my goodness! That is a bat!”

“Yeah! How do I get it out?” I pleaded, in my best attempt of the Ecuadorian whine.

Minutes later Sarita and I entered my room again, each of us with a broom in hand. I don’t think that either of us had a plan, but we both felt better with brooms hanging on our shoulders like baseball bats.

“Alright,” I started, but before I had a chance to strategize with her, Sarita began to beat the bat with her broom from outside of the mosquito net. I ran for the doorway. Sarita stopped and we both just sat there and listened. Clearly the bat would let us know if was dead or not. Nothing. Since Sarita had done the beating, I felt it was my turn to step up. I lifted the net and peeked at the spot where the bat once had been.

“Its not there.” I reported.

“Do you think it left?” Sarita asked.

I looked all over my bed and the net hoping to see the bat laying dead somewhere, but saw nothing.

“I don’t know where it went.”

Just as I was about to shut the net again so that Sarita and I could regroup, I spotted the bat on the other side of the net trying to hide between the mattress and the wall.

“There it is!!”

“Where?” Sarita readied her broom. “We have to kill it.”

I looked at the bat again, as it unsuccessfully tried to escape, and for the first time I felt sorry for it. He was probably just an average teenage bat, looking for a new adventure. A montage of the bat’s afternoon played in my head. He happily flew around light posts, enjoyed a lunch of flies, and swooped at a few humans as his friends laughed in the background. His mother had probably warned him a million times not to get too close to front doors, and he had probably blown off her advice as teenagers often do, wondering, “whats the worst that could happen?” He was probably just a nice bat, who had made a bad decision. Now he was scared and probably hurt, cowering in the corner trying to figure a way out of his predicament. I felt sorry for the bat.

“Maybe we should just try and catch him and throw him outside.” I suggested, knowing that when I said ´we´ I really meant ´you.´

“No,” Sarita replied. “We should kill it.”

At this time we completely opened one side of my mosquito net so that Sarita could get a good swing at the bat. I shed a tear as all of the mosquitoes in San Vicente took advantage of my open net and made sure to invite their uncles, siblings, and cousins. I no longer felt sorry the bat.

Sarita got into a perfect batter’s stance and took one, smooth, hard swing at the bat. WHACK! We stood there and watched it. It didn’t move. WHACK! Sarita swung again, and we both paused for a second. WHACK! Sarita hit the bat one more time just to make sure it wasn’t just pretending to be dead. With a plastic bag, I picked up little Carlitos (I named him afterward) and put him on the floor of my room. I then proceeded to sweep him out of my room, into the living room, and out the front door. One thought crossed my mind: its time to blog.


Since I blogged last a few things have changed, I have found constructive, useful ways to occupy my time. I have been teaching English at the Colegio Manglar (the school’s name) three times a week. I have classes of kids from 5 to about 17 years old and its really nice to be able to work with all different ages. I have been going into my memory bank to find fun activities that teachers did with my classes while I was learning Spanish, and am trying to imitate them as best as possible. My favorite one is taking a popular song that the kids want to learn and printing out the lyrics on a sheet with a lot of the words missing. I then play the song and the kids have to listen and try to fill in the missing words. After we finish they can ask about words they don’t understand etc. (shout out to Ms. Fischer!). With the older kids I am doing Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and with the younger kids we are doing a song from High School Musical. They love it.

Since I started talking to the mayor’s wife I have started to give little workshops to all of the seventh grade classes in town (there about 13). The workshops are mainly on self-esteem and decision making and while the kids don’t always show up, I try to make it worth it for those that do. After I am through with all the seventh grade classes, the mayor’s wife, Maria del Carmen, would like me to start giving HIV AIDS workshops to the high schools in the town.

I came home one afternoon to find two teachers at the school for kids with special needs in my living room waiting for me. When I sat to talk with them they asked if I could come and work with their kids. When I told them that I have no experience working with kids with special needs, they told me that no one at the school really did, and that any help would be appreciated. I agreed to go on a Thursday morning and do an activity with the kids. I didn’t know what to expect and to be honest, the situation was a lot worse than I had anticipated. There was one classroom for children from the ages of about 4 to 19, maybe older. Though I don’t know much about special needs I know that in that room there were kids that fell all over the special needs spectrum. There was one situation that really stuck out to me. There were four kids who where about 16 years old and deaf. Since I know no sign language, I had been writing the activity on the board so that these teenagers could follow along. I got half way through the activity when I realized that not only could they not hear, but they couldn’t read either. When I tried to imitate some signs out of one of their sign language books, the teacher informed me that the only knew the alphabet and that they couldn’t read lips. When I asked how their parents communicated with them she told me that they didn’t. I can’t imagine going 16 years without being able to express an idea. Though I am somewhat under qualified (understatement), I am brainstorming ways that I can help these kids to maybe read, write, or sign. If you have any ideas please share.

Oh, and my basketball team. I have good news and bad new about that. They good news is there are a lot of kids who are interested and have signed up to play. The bad news is that there are no basketballs. Well, we have one. But its flat, and we can’t find a pump. We are working on maybe getting the mayor to help us buy a few though. I know I am going to buy a couple basketballs and a pump. We’ll work it out. I want to get started with that next week.

So yeah, things are slowly falling into place. Its just that this whole integrating thing is a really slow process and I am really impatient. I am happy, though, with the way that things are going and excited to try and help in a lot of different ways.

Side note: As confusing as it I for my brain when my eyes try to convince it that Brett Favre now wears purple, I am becoming very fond of his right arm. That 80-yard, back-of-the-end-zone, game-winning touchdown pass was perfection. Not to mention the catch and effort to stay in bounds. Being a Minnesota fan all the way from Ecuador won’t be easy, but somebody has to do it. Go Vikings.

This blog post goes out to Carlitos. A fun-loving, curious bat who will never be forgotten. R.I.P. 9/27/2009