My Fury Little Friends

Despite Haiti’s depleted forests and ravaged landscape, I have had some very interesting interactions with animals, both domesticated and wild. I’ve written about the goats, cows, and pigs, but recently I’ve experienced some of Haiti’s other “wild” life.

There is a cat at the mission who I have taken a liking to. Her name is Mimi, though to be fair she doesn’t really have a name, Mimi is the Haitian Creole word for kitty. Haitians don’t keep pets the way Americans do. Any animal that a Haitian keeps must serve a purpose beyond being cute, and most of them are not given names the way we give animals names. Mimi is here at the mission to keep out the rats, and she does a good job because I’ve only seen one rat so far. Mimi will often be found in the kitchen cabinets. She’s not in their by her own accord, rather she is thrown in there by one of the women who works in the kitchen in order to hunt the rats living there. Mimi is very sweet, but she is also pretty scrawny looking. She is about half the size of an average American cat without very much meat on her.

A few weeks ago Mimi had a litter of kittens, and now any time I go walking up the stairs to the roof I hear three high pitched kittens shouting “meow” at me. Now some people don’t care for cats, but I don’t think there is anyone who dislikes kittens. These three kittens, or as I call them “Petit Mimis”, are absolutely adorable and have consumed much of my time in the past few days. They all have bright blue eyes, and are about as playful as any animal I’ve ever seen. They are still getting used to walking, and will regularly slide around, some times spilling out on all fours when walking on the tile floor. They have become comfortable with me and now follow me around. When I go down the three steps from the porch to my room, they hesitantly follow me. They take a few steps, look out on to the stairs, and leap down in an almost cartoon like fashion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen three more adorable animals.

Every night when I am up working, at some point I hear a quiet but shrill “eee-eee-eee”. The noise is never very loud, so I just figured that it was some bird or some small animal outside of my window. When the volunteer groups were here the sound went away, but recently the sound has come back. The other night I was talking with Pastor Evans and I heard it again. I asked him about it and he said that it was a bat. I always knew there were bats around the mission, though I can’t say I was thrilled to learn that they were living right outside of my bedroom. While sitting on the roof late at night, I had seen them occasionally flying around and quietly making noises and finding bugs. There are lots of dark spots in the mission that don’t receive any sun during the day, and that is where the bats perch themselves until night fall when the bats come out to feast on the many insects swarming all over the place. When the mission teams are here they make a lot more noise and emit a lot more light than I do when I am here alone, thus causing the bats try to stay away. Now that I am the only one here, the bats have come back in full force and regularly patrol the halls of the mission at night. Most nights when I am walking up the dark hallway that leads to the porch, I will see some black thing flapping around in the air. The other night I was walking to the bathroom and one just flew right at me. I get a little freaked out by them, but I can’t complain too much because they eat the majority of the bugs that would other wise eat me. The bats are kind of neat to see flying around in the sky. They are not anywhere near as sleek or smooth as I would have expected, they flap around and look almost jumpy as they dance in the night sky.

The other night I was sitting out on the roof and I heard something rustle in the trees. I figured it was a goat or cow below, but it kept moving around, so I flashed my light on it only to see a giant rat staring right back at me. Now I have no idea how the rat got onto the tree, the three is about forty feet in the air, and there are no branches on it except at the very top (the tree is a papaya tree with only papayas on the very top), so I don’t think the rat climbed the tree from the ground. The tree is about two feet from the roof, so I guess the rat could have jumped from the roof onto the tree, but two feet seems like a far distance for a rat to simply jump. The rat rustled around a little more and then disappeared. I have no idea where that rat disappeared to, but I’ve seen Mimi scouring the field below the roof where the tree sits, so I can’t help but wonder if she found him.

There seems to be an infinite amount of flies, bugs, roaches, spiders, and other creepy crawly little creatures constantly scuttling and flying around the mission. The other day a spider who’s body looked to be as big as a quarter waltzed right into my room. I threw my sandal at him and he scurried away. I knew he had come in not because I could see him but because I heard him on the ground. The other bugs are pretty annoying though they don’t do much to gross me out. There are a bunch of moths that constantly flutter around my computer screen and get dirt all over my computer. There are thousands of mosquitoes who swarm around me, but I’ve become quite adept at swatting them and catching them mid air. I’ve lost most any fear I once had of roaches or other big bugs. There are roaches that crawl around the kitchen and the halls outside of my room. I will squish them when I have a shoe hard enough to do the job. There are lizards that slink around the mission gobbling up any insect not fast enough to escape it. I used to think the lizards were kind of gross but now I appreciate them because they eat everything that would otherwise try to eat me.

Haiti is full of surprises, not all of which are human.