On the subject of rats...

In the process of cleaning out my house for my upcoming departure, I found this handwritten, unsent letter from a year and a half ago. It made me crack up all over again...

October 16, 2007

An average night in rural Vanuatu:

For the first time, I set a rat trap myself, making me feel 1) independent 2) more honest - if a rat is going to die at my command, I may as well face up to it. Though I’m still not quite ready for the aftermath.

So, I set the trap, take my kerosene lamp and head out for the night. My hope is that the deed will be done in the early evening and I can get someone else to dispose of it, rather than hearing that awful sound in the middle of the night.

But unfortunately all the fearless little boys I was dining with fell asleep right after eating, as people here are wont to do. It sometimes looks like a weird mass suicide when you slowly see men, women and children dropping like flies onto pandanus mats. So I go to my house to check and open my door to find the rat sort of moving, obviously not dead, but I was confused as he was a good foot and a half away from where I set the trap, but instead of shining my light to get a closer look I freaked out and ran for Saki, my only friend/close neighbour still awake at the late night hour of 9 p.m.

Saki, or Jacqueline, is also the only person here also squeamish/scared/traumatized by dead rats. She swallows her fear, ready to do the job, but at the last minute we decide to try to find our other friends, which leads to a comedy of errors sneaking around the village, whispering in young girls’ windows like secret lovers do here, and of course only waking their mothers.

Unsuccessful, we return to my house and decide to just throw the rat outside with the trap and get Debor to deal with it in the morning. But of course, we soon realize, a cat will come in the night and either run off with or ruin the trap (I only cared because it wasn’t mine and you can’t buy new ones on the island). During this discussion, Saki tries to convince me that hiding the dead rat and trap in my currently empty laundry bucket is a great solution, but I refuse for hygiene & ickiness reasons she’ll never understand.

In the meantime, we (she) bring it outside, at which point she exclaims it is still not yet dead and suggests perching the unit on a piece of wood and hoping for the best. Of course I protest screaming that we have to put it out of its misery which leads to a horrible beating scene with a nearby blunt object.

It then occurs to me, we could put the corpse and trap in a plastic bag and hang it with rope we can make from scraping off some local bark nearby, thereby keeping the trap safe until morning -- all of this because neither of us want to touch the rat to remove it. So my plan is executed, we are shrieking and laughing the whole time -- at the horror of it, at our own fear, at the absurdity of the whole process, and also because Ni-Vanuatu shriek and laugh whenever they do anything.

I can just imagine Deborah’s face when she dutifully appears at 6 a.m. after hearing about the rat, and I lead her to the hanging concoction in my bush kitchen as if I actually expect her to spend her morning unraveling it.

And so.

A slice of life, if you will. Every day I become a little more brutal, a little more shameless and a little more able to to take responsibility for the pain I inflict on other living beings. There’s Ahimsa-in-the-City and then there’s living in the bush. You learn to become a hunter whether you eat the stuff or not.

As per usual, I am still in Vila waiting for things to dry out on Tongoa so I can head back there. In the meantime, I am still having a great time in Vila. Flight "scheduled" for tomorrow. We'll see what happens.