The Second Imbeba Saga

The Second Imbeba Saga

Last night I came home and was sitting in my bed watching “Anchor Man” when I noticed a strange object chilling in the bed with my. As you can imagine it is difficult to see things by Kerosene lamp alone so I had to get rather close to the mysterious object to determine what it was. To my horror, I realized upon further inspection that it was a bone. Yes a bone. Not a large one but not a tiny one either. Naturally, I was horrified and after my initial first 5 minutes of silently shuttering and screaming (so as not to alert my host family because quite honestly their involvement would have made the whole thing 100% more stressful), I calmed down and tried to reason out why there would be a bone in my bed and what exactly I should do about it. I don’t know a lot about bones but it is  my generally understanding that they do not move of their own accord, so I decided something had to have put it there. My first assumption was obviously that my host family was messing with me, but once my paranoia subsided I remembered that I had all three keys to the door and that was not possible. Assumption number was that one of the mice who live in my ceiling (yes there are mice that live in my ceiling it is not the best of situations) had died and its bone had fallen out into my bed. However, after intensive inspection I realized there were no holes in my ceiling and that the bone was too large to be a mouse or a rat’s bone. Finally, I settled on the fact that a mouse had taken the bone and brought it into my bed to nest – after taking a text survey of other volunteers I was told mice do this – gross. I know. After ripping apart my room to make sure there wasn’t a snake because even though everyone told me it was not possible I was partially convinced a snake had eaten a mouse in my room and left a bone. (turns out that is not how snakes consume mice but whatever).

            After taking some sleeping pills so I could convince myself to actually crawl into my bed and throwing the bone in my trash box, I finally crawled into bed. Problem solved. Nope. Not quite.

            I came home the next day to find the bone IN THE SAME EXACT PLACE IN MY BED. Naturally the paranoia that someone was messing with me resurfaced but soon I calmed down and realized that the mouse had crawled into my trash box, rescued its toy and placed it back in my bed. Feeling a little bit like a crazy person at this point, I built a trap to stop the mouse from getting back in to my room, put the bone in a ziplock bag and taped it to my wall so that I would know without a shadow of a doubt if it moved again. Yea, this is the type of thing I revert to in this country. In the morning I woke up to realize that the bag had fallen off the wall and the mouse had chewed a hole in the bag and stolen the bone and it was nowhere to be found. This was getting ridiculous. (Also yes I realize that the real solution to all of this was to throw away the bone, but I had no other way to track if the mouse was still in my room.)

            When I returned from class that day the bone was on top of my pile of clothes because I had made a barracade to keep the mouse off my bed. This was the last straw and promptly threw the bone out the window. Moments later I heard scuttling behind my trunk and when I went to investigate came face to face with the culprit himself. IT was one of those rare nights where I get to have a beer in this country so I was in a charitable mood and decided to level with the mouse. The conversation (yes I said this outloud) went something like this:

Me: Game over buddy. The bone is gone. I really don’t wanna have to catch you, I know you came in right there. If you leave peacefully no one will get hurt.

The mouse stared at me for a second and then seemed to think this was a reasonable offer because he scampered right out the hole in my door.

*This was the most exciting and dramatic interaction of my week. A battle of wills with a creature whose brain is the size of a pea. Riddiculous. But in the end I was victorious so I guess it could have been a lot worse.