Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Scorpions, Cucarachas, and Other Creepy Crawlers

Waking up in the morning is hard enough when you’re waking up before the sun rises. It was even more difficult today because as I was leaving my room I found myself face-to-pincher with a scorpion. People warned us of them when we arrived, but for some reason I never thought I would actually come across one. Boy was I wrong!

He was little and yellowish in color. He didn’t move much and when he did it was very slowly. This was much different than the lightning fast gecko we found in the bathroom last week. I calmly went to the stairwell to call for my roommates to come upstairs and bring a shoe to smash him with. But 30 seconds was all it took for him to get away. We turned our room inside out and squashed all of our shoes with a broom just in case he burrowed in one of them. After all, scorpions like to hide in dark places. But we couldn’t find him. I convinced myself he was hiding in the pair of shoes he was closes to the last time I saw him, so I swept the shoes outside to “let him free.” It was all I could do.

All day I told students and teachers about my encounter with the scorpion. Everybody I talked to was very nonchalant about it. They all had their own stories about their encounters with scorpions. The worst that happens is you get stung, in which case you go to the hospital for treatment. No big deal. But then, a student informed me that the scorpion I saw was one of the more dangerous ones. Apparently, the smaller they are, the more poisonous. So I guess feeling safer because he was a “little guy” who didn’t move quickly was wrong.

At the end of the day my roommates and I were afraid to go home. We ended up going to Lynne’s house for advice. She was shocked. This was the first sighting of a scorpion in our complex in four years, which I’m pretty sure is when the houses were built. She sent us home with a can of Baygon, which we diligently sprayed all of our windows and doors with to keep the creepy crawlers out.

Unfortunately, the Baygon was not enough to keep the bugs away from us. It may have even caused them to come out of their hiding spots. The first sighting of the evening was of a scorpion—hopefully the same one from before! This time it was Cynhia that called us all upstairs—of course it was in our room again. Within seconds Erin was ready for battle, with a shoe in hand and close toed shoes on her feet. She valiantly stepped up and squashed it. Its guts spewed all over the floor, and I sprayed it with some Baygon just to make sure he was really dead. We’re too afraid to pick up his remains because scorpion tails can still sting after the scorpion itself has died. So we are too afraid to move it and are leaving him on the floor until the morning.

As Cynhia and I were writing our blogs we spotted another creepy insect—a cucaracha! Cockroaches are ugly, and much larger than the scorpion we encountered. But fortunately, they are not poisonous. So when we saw him we didn’t hold back our emotions. We screamed and ran, and wildly sprayed him with Baygon. But it didn’t stop him from scurrying out of our room and into Alyssa and Erin’s. He tried to escape out the door that connects to a patio, but was trapped. I took this time to spray him with more Baygon which slowed his movements enough for us to squash him.

Even though we’ve won all of our battles with the bugs today, Cynhia and I are sleeping with the lights on. I can’t help but think a scorpion is coming to attack me every time I see a shadow or feel my hair brush up against my arm. Especially since Cynhia’s class informed her that every time a scorpion lays eggs it produces 1,000 baby scorpions. I hope we killed our scorpion before it had a chance to reproduce! I’m also thinking about inviting all of the geckos of Sayulita to live in our house. Apparently, they eat scorpions so they can protect us!



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