Monday, 6 February 2012

There’s a rat in me kitchen

For those of you who are concerned that I am having too good a time out here, I shall now tell you a little about the less glamorous side of life.  For the last week or so, I have slept very badly at night.  This is partly because it has been too warm, but that’s another story.  Since I have been awake a lot in the night, I have heard a lot of noises that I believed to belong to something other than the bats in the attic or the lizards that scurry up and down the walls.  I was worried that it could be mice or rats as previous volunteers had warned me that these things did show up every now and then.  However, other than the noises and my paranoia, I did not have any evidence of these nocturnal visitors.

Last night, after one of the more awful journeys back from Kigali (taking four rather than two hours), and whilst feeling very sorry for myself as I have a pretty heavy head cold and the heat is making it feel even more uncomfortable – I was sitting in my lounge watching a tv programme.  A movement caught my eye and  I most definitely saw something running along by the wall near the back door.  Something had come in under the back door, scurried along the wall around the dining room, into the lounge and then down the corridor.  Feeling slightly disgusted by this, I felt I needed to go and investigate.  So I bravely turned on all the lights in the two spare rooms and the bathroom and took my headtorch to search under furniture.  I couldn’t see it anywhere.  I shook out things and prodded and poked, but nothing.
I was convinced that this was more than my usual paranoia, so I went to look out the trap that Stella had shown me she had bought for such occasions.  I went out to see Justin to see if he knew how it worked.  Of course he did.  There followed an entertaining 20minutes whilst Justin and I set a feast for a rat/mouse.  We started with bread, but then he explained they really liked nuts.  I had nuts, so I went and got some.  He attached them to the trap and proceeded to burn them with a lighter so that they were a bit roasted.  At this point I did have to laugh about this carefully prepared feast for the rat/mouse.
With the feast prepared, we left the trap in the corridor, and turned off the lights and closed the door.  Sure enough, a few hours later, when I was lying awake on my summer cold death bed, I heard the sound of the trap in action.  I decided to leave it to the morning to see if it had worked, or if the rodent had escaped it’s fate.  I slowly opened the door to the corridor this morning, almost anticipating a tide of rats running out across my feet or perhaps I would see a load of rats feasting on whatever lay in the trap...there was most definitely a rat in the trap.  It was definitely dead.  It was no time for squeamishness, the rat corpse had to be removed, so I found the dustpan and brush and shoved the trap with rat into it and carried it outside.  I donned my gardening gloves and set to opening the trap over the rubbish heap so that the rat could fall onto it without me needing to touch it.  All the while shuddering with disgust, of course.
I suspect this will not be my only encounter with a dead rat in my trap.  Maybe next time I’ll even take some photos to share with you all.

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