spiders

[Guest guest]

You think your little house spiders are bad? Try living in the tropics.

Nothing poisonous, but the spiders, including the legs, were the size of the

palm of my hand. The bodies alone were over 1 inch in diameter. I tried not to

kill them as they did eat the big roaches in the house. Big roaches means

bigger spiders. But, if they had an egg sack, out came the Raid. Especially

when the occasional one would make it inside the sanctuary of my mosquito net

covered bed... I may have been in my mid-20's back then, but every neighbor

within yelling distance was at my house the first time I found one of those

spiders in bed with me. The main good thing about the spiders was that they

didn't make webs across doorways. That is the part I hate most about little

spiders... I've never liked webs. The big ones in the Dominican Republic didn't

so I didn't mind them too much...

OK, so here's a funny spider story that I have to tell. I was at that time only

in country for a week or so, living in my host families house in Santo Domingo.

We'd been in training for a couple of days, not long enough for me to know any

Spanish. I needed to get to my vitamin pills in my duffle bag, which were in a

pocket on the side that was not zipped. I reached in to get it and pulled out,

not the pill bottle, but one of those giganitic spiders the size of my hand.

Being very new to the third world experience, I screamed bloody murder. Every

member of my family and a few neighbors came running into my room to save the

stupid American (yes, I was very stupid then)... I was crying I was so scared.

I didn't know the word for spider, so I looked it up in my dictionary and yelled

" sand! sand! " and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Not knowing what I

had said, I gave the dictionary to my dona, who fortunately could read, but only

after hunting her glasses for 5 minutes. Finally, she found the glasses, got

the dictionary, and read the word I was pointing to, " spider " . The Spanish word

for spider is " arana " and the word for sand is " arena " and not knowing Spanish

at all, I had misprounced the word for spider... My dona then got the local

version of Raid, Baygon, and sprayed my room, not that it did any good.

Later, I told my training class the storey, they were all laughing, but

terrified. All of learned the hard lesson of zipping closed anything that could

be!

Genie

 

 

 

 

 

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