retro: into that good night

Over the course of my travels, I have slept in many, many beds. It's frequently been the nature of my work to sleep wherever there's a bit of free space: innumerable thin foam mattresses, a dozen creaky canvas cots, couches and floors and beds so hard they may as well have been floors. I have spent countless nights lying awake on these beds, tormented in turn by the heat and the cold, illness and nerves, itchy fleabites and upset stomachs and, on one memorable occasion, a particularly loud colony of frogs. Just the other night I discovered flying ant larvae nestled in my blankets, and have been suffering phantom creepy-crawlies ever since.

But never, and I mean never, have I had so much trouble sleeping as I did as a volunteer in Nicaragua.

Ironically, my allotted sleeping space was pretty nice. The bed was a real mattress, a luxury I have since rarely seen even in more affluent towns. No doubt it was my host parents' bed, quietly surrendered to me with the sort of selflessness usually seen only in anonymous kidney donors. There were no sheets to worry about; I just sprawled across the bare mattress, travel pillow smushed securely between my head and the wall. For the first couple weeks, my little sisters took turns sleeping with me. 11-year-old Julieta tended to tuck in close behind me, huddled against my back, while 9-year-old Marta was an aggressive cuddler, wrapping her arms and legs around me every night like a spider monkey. I was forever carefully unwrapping her and rolling her over onto her other side, only to watch as, like a perpetual motion machine, she instantly rolled back over and clung onto me again.

At some point, they both stopped sleeping with me. To this day, I sometimes worry that my host mother found out they were disrupting my sleep and ordered them to let me have the bed to myself. It's a stupid thing to let ruffle my conscience, but if I've learned one thing from my mother, it's that you can never have too much guilt or garlic. I feel guilty for stealing a piece of a stranger's pretzel when I was five years old, I feel guilty for things I've done in dreams, and I feel guilty for unintentionally forcing my host sisters to sleep three to a bed.

Our town had no electricity, so everyone went to bed shortly after nightfall. I got in the habit of reading to Marta and Julieta in the evenings - after we watched our novela on our cousins' car battery-powered television, of course. I had brought a stash of Spanish-language children's books, and every night we would sit on the edge of my bed, the girls pressed up close against my sides, and read Dr. Seuss. One of the girls would hold up a little white candle for light, dripping wax on the pages and occasionally "accidentally" singeing a piece of my hair.

One night, during a particularly spirited recitation of Cómo el Grinch Robó la Navidad, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Snagging the candle from Marta, I turned around to investigate, only to discover that the wall was swarming with ants. Not tiny, harmless ants, like the kind that would later plague my cereal in Granada. No, these were big, black, ass-kicking ants, the panzer division of the ant army. I knew from experience that a bite from one of those bad boys felt a lot like getting hit in the hand with a baseball bat. A baseball bat covered in spikes.

"ANTS," I said, calmly, to my sisters.

"Ants," they agreed. Julieta reached over and flicked one off the wall.

"ANTS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

I believed then as I do now that compromise is key to cross-cultural understanding, but I straight-up could not sleep with my head tucked up against the Demon Ant Super-Highway. I began to sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, like a dog. My legs stuck off the edge of the mattress, but who cared? At least I had put a safe distance between my body and the ant battalion, although frequently a handful of them would trek all the way down the mattress just to see how I was getting on.

Then I noticed the scorpions.

Well, okay, I had noticed them before. What I hadn't noticed was that they tended to mosey across the outside wall. The wall I was now snuggling up to every night.

In other words: "SCORPIONS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

Reasonably, I thought, I began pushing the mattress away from the wall a few inches. My 15-year-old sister Milagros thought I was insane. "They'll just walk across the floor and up the side of the mattress and get you that way," she said.

"LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING," I replied.

So that took care of the ants and the scorpions. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

One night, I woke up around 1:00 A.M. feeling sick and over-hot. Venturing out to the latrine was not an option; at night, it swarmed with cockroaches the size of small dogs. I resigned myself to hours of misery, hoping vaguely that I would drift back into sleep but knowing enough not to count on it.

Half an hour into my ordeal, I was distracted from my suffering by a strange, clicking, sibilant sound. The house was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of my bed was level with the ground outside. And something was out there, on the other side of the wall. Something...hissing.

"Milagros," I whispered urgently. "Mili! Is that a snake?"

She sat bolt upright. "What? Where?"

I shushed her, indicating that she should listen. A moment later, we both heard it - a whistling hiss that trailed off into a series of clicks.

She swallowed audibly and said, "It's just crickets." She seemed uncertain, and I wasn't buying it. Crickets my ass. Since when did crickets hiss? Or have teeth?

Satisfied with her assessment of the situation, Milagros kicked Marta's legs away and went back to sleep. Whatever my fate was to be that night, I was going to face it alone.

I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.

Quiz time!

Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.

Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.

Throughout that long night, as my stomach twisted and cramped, I listened to the snake slide back and forth on the other side of the wall. The roof was only casually connected to the walls, leaving plenty of room for a determined death-bringer to squeeze through and kill us all in our beds. Could snakes climb walls? I was pretty sure they could. On the other hand, most of my snake knowledge came from Jumanji and The Jungle Book. On the other other hand, it was a really short wall.

Either Disney lied to me about wildlife abilities and behaviors (ha ha, like they'd ever do that), or snakes aren't actually too interested in sweaty, unshowered gringa as a main course. Whatever the reason, the snake didn't slither over the wall that night, or the next night, or the next. In fact, it stayed outside for the next two weeks, jealously guarding its territory every night, until the day I left. I know this because I was awake for every one of those nights. I never intended to stay awake. I would doze off after storytime, then jolt awake a few hours later, my heart in my throat. The bastard was always there, gliding leisurely along the length of wall that separated us, occasionally slowing down as it passed my head as if to suggest that this was the night it would come over the wall and eat my face. I could never fall back asleep, so I would lie there listening to it until dawn, scratching my mosquito bites and amending my mental hierarchy of nocturnal enemies.

In this way, we passed our nights together: the snake moving back and forth along its familiar path, hissing and clicking, and me curled up at one end of my mattress, mud-flaked toes twitching nervously in midair, wondering what else might be hiding out there in the dark.

snow white

I am really, really white.

Okay, that's not really "news" as such. I'm English, Russian and German, which means (1) I'm a tremendous asshole, and (2) I cannot display my legs in public without blinding all onlookers. I am only slightly exaggerating. The supernatural paleness of my skin has been the subject of much discussion since I started traveling. My host mother in Nicaragua observed that my feet were the color of milk. The chatty nurses at the Ministry of Health used to say that I made all their photos look overexposed. In Mexico, I was regularly stopped by old women as I walked through their little towns and informed, quite gravely, that mine were the whitest legs they'd ever seen.

Some people can pull off the pale look. Anne Hathaway, for example. Gorgeous! Or Christina Hendricks - phwoar. Their skin is like fine bone china, and those bitches are working it for all it's worth.

They also clearly sleep underground, carry parasols and have not seen the beach even once in the last twenty years. The rest of us must balance our desire to protect our delicate complexions with the fact that most of Planet Earth is, in fact, outside. As for me, the instant I expose my pasty white skin to direct sunlight, my look becomes less "porcelain" and more "cracked terracotta."

It's easy to avoid the sun in Cleveland, as it's cloudy, raining, snowing or sleeting approximately 361 days out of the year. But the minute I venture out of the overcast haven of the Midwest and actually encounter that big shiny thing in the sky, my defenseless skin loses its ever-loving mind.

"FUCK OH MY CHRIST WHAT THE HELL IS THAT," it says, cringing away from the sun's rays like a small animal cornered by a slavering beast.

"That's the sun," I say patiently, slopping on another liter of sunblock. "It keeps us alive. Seriously, we've been over this like a million times."

"OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," my skin wails, and abruptly bursts into flames.

So I spend most of my time abroad wearing a skin-suit the approximate hue and texture of a quality salmon fillet. I've built up a tolerance for the pain, but the sight of my sun-broiled flesh generally causes a great deal of alarm among my non-white associates. "What happened to you?" they demand. Invariably they reach out to touch, then hesitate when I flinch. "Does it hurt?" they ask, curious hands still hovering above my skin, as if warming by a fire.

"A little," I lie. "It's not as bad as it looks. Say, do you know where I can procure a large quantity of dry ice?"

Even when my skin's not falling off in sheets the size of playing cards, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I am evidently a rare mosquito delicacy, and my whiteness causes the flaming red bites to stand out like scarlet letters, drawing a lot of unwanted attention from every well-meaning grandma and taxi driver in a twelve-mile radius, each bursting with useful insights such as: "You know, you should really use repellent." And: "Have you considered pants?"

In some places, even my plain old unblemished skin is enough to draw a crowd. I used to dread walking through one of my "base cities" in Nicaragua, one of the only places I've ever felt distinctly uncomfortable about the nature of the cat-calls directed my way. This would be the town where, not thirty seconds after emerging from the Ministry of Health building, I was hailed by a group of young men. "Hello!" they chorused gaily, and then, when I didn't respond to their satisfaction, "You are a dirty fifty-cent whore." (Well, actually, they said it in Spanish, and they said "10-córdoba." Still, my going rate at the time was upwards of five dollars, so what the hell did they know.)

I've been called by a lot of nicknames. Chela was popular in Nicaragua, güera in Mexico. Both mean "white girl." More general terms like gringo/a and farang tend to mean this, too - while they technically mean American or foreigner, it's understood in many places that Americans are white. Just ask any Company volunteer or staff member of color; I guarantee they've had the following conversation more times than they can count.

LOCAL: So where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: California.
LOCAL: No, where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: Uh...I was born in New Jersey?
LOCAL: Look, where are your parents from?
VOLUNTEER: Annapolis.
LOCAL: And their parents?
VOLUNTEER: Same.
LOCAL: And their parents?
[15 minutes later.]
VOLUNTEER: Okay, fine, I think my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born in China.
LOCAL: A-ha! Just what I thought, chinita.

So, obviously, I could have it a lot worse. I know that. I understand that complaining about my pale skin is kind of like bitching about the heaviness of my golden mantle and the discomfort of my diamond-encrusted shoes. At home and abroad, my pinkish epidermis allows me an insane level of privilege of which I'm usually not even aware. In a lot of places, due in large part to some tricky cultural and socioeconomic issues -

[Dear M,
Don't you dare detour into a discussion of cultural hegemony. Don't do it! No one cares!
Kisses,
M]

- uhh, where was I. Oh, right: due in large part to all that, light skin is valued and sought after in many places in a way that'll give you the heebie-jeebies. You can't walk into a drugstore here in Thailand without seeing shelves upon shelves of supposedly skin-lightening products with names like "White Radiance" and "White Perfect." In fact, I have yet to find a moisturizer here that doesn't claim to bleach the user's complexion. Lots of the women at the shelter use these or similar products, and more than one person has poked at the pale skin above my tan lines and told me that my skin is beautiful. Even the men on the construction team hide their faces behind hot, heavy canvas veils, because dark skin marks a person as a laborer.

So I'm lucky, undeservedly privileged, because, for better or worse, I'm as white as it gets.

But seriously, you guys: who do I have to bribe, kill or screw to get a decent base tan?

retro: the scorpion king

I talk a lot of crap about Paraguay. Tripe this, Nazis that, demonic host mother wah wah wah. It's actually a fine country, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there. The thing is that, on a personal level, my time in Paraguay was without question the most unpleasant travel experience I've yet had. To this day, I have semi-regular nightmares about being sent back to live with my host family.

There is one arena, though, in which Paraguay stands heads and shoulders above the competition: bugs.

As in, there really weren't any. There was the occasional spider the size of your hand, but they were fairly passive and easy to kill. Our most serious pest problem involved frogs. And fleas. And foot parasites. Okay, on second thought, there were plenty of bugs in Paraguay.

Nicaragua, though - Nicaragua presented a whole new set of plagues. The latrines were filled with equal parts human waste and genetically-enhanced cockroaches. I was beset by swarms of mosquitoes, which had been virtually nonexistent in Paraguay. Worst of all, Nicaragua was the country where I discovered scorpions.

Scorpions are the worst.

I was only stung once during my first summer in Nicaragua, but it was more than enough to put me off the whole thing for life. The incident in question occurred when a scorpion of unknown size, species and political loyalties scampered over my hand in the middle of the night and thoughtfully decided to leave his calling card. If any of you would like to experience such a thing for yourselves, I would recommend that you get a friend to wake you up by stabbing you in the hand with a cattle prod. And then have them turn up the voltage. And then kick you in the stomach, just for laughs.

I jolted awake to a burst of fiery agony, pain flaring across the back of my knuckles and up my pointer finger. "HURGH," I said, clutching my hand to my chest. "GLRRK. HRBRBTL." Deprived of both oxygen and vowels, the only coherent thought I was able to process was that I had to be quiet, so as not to wake anyone up. Imminent death is one thing, but there's just no excuse for inconveniencing folks.

I rocked back and forth for a while, mouth open in a giant, wheezing O - the only time in my memory that I have ever been too incapacitated to curse. My fingers didn't seem to be moving very well, but I figured that was just a side effect of my failing nervous system, so I wasn't too terribly concerned. I looked forward to it, actually. Sensory deprivation sounded like an excellent idea at that point.

Looking back, it's clear that I probably should have said something. "Hey, Josefina," I might have whispered to my host sister in the next bed. "Listen, I hate to bother you, but I think I'm dying." Instead, I heaved one shaky breath after another, fingers fever-hot and swelling up like balloon animals, and eventually passed out.

I was fine, of course. My hand was swollen in the morning, but the searing pain had given way to a dull throb of discomfort. Within days, the soreness and the swelling had both vanished, and I pushed the incident to the back of my mind, a mildly amusing story to tell my friends when I came home.

A few days later, my partner J and I were sitting on my bed, preparing for the next day's class. I was sitting against the wall, head tilted back against the rough dried-mud surface as I tried to think up a better strategy for wrangling 45 small and insolent children. Anything had to be better than our current tactics of menace and bribery - though, admittedly, we would happily have carried on with these if they had actually worked. (Is it any wonder I went on to study politics?)

Out of the blue, J said, "Hey, M, could you come over here for a minute?" In retrospect, she was remarkably calm, especially for someone whose own run-in with a scorpion had resulted in the kind of screams known to shatter glass and knock satellites out of orbit.

"Why?"

"Just come here," she said evasively.

Confused, I scooted over to her part of the bed, at which point she grabbed my face and turned me around to see the World's Largest Scorpion sauntering up the wall right next to where my head had been.

It is impossible to exaggerate the size of this scorpion. It was larger than my hand; very possibly it was larger than God's hand. I've owned smaller cats. I could not believe that something so huge and evil-looking was allowed to exist. It seemed to upset the natural balance of things. Like, surely if this monstrosity was allowed to roam free, the world should also be filled with giant kittens and bunny rabbits, to compensate.

When I get to this point in the story, people invariably ask me the same question: So how did you kill it?

To which I invariably reply: Motherfucker, are you high?

Because, of course, I did not kill it. I didn't happen to have my armor-piercing bullets with me, and a grenade might only have made it angry. In all seriousness, the only weapon that could have taken this thing down was a machete. Besides, it was almost certainly some sort of god, and I wasn't willing to risk bringing its wrath down upon my unprotected head.

Too stunned to beg for mercy, J and I just watched with shock and awe as the scorpion strolled up and over the wall, easily slipping through the gap between wall and roof, and disappeared from our lives forever.

I've since encountered lots of scorpions: big scorpions, baby scorpions, brown and red and orange scorpions. I've found them under my cot, inside my mosquito netting, investigating the contents of my backpack. I am notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to bugs - except for the occasional pet spider - but despite the fact that I hate and fear scorpions above all other vermin, I have yet to kill one. I'm intimidated by the difficulty of such an attempt, especially considering that my hand-eye coordination leaves a lot to be desired. But I'm also worried that, should I succeed in slaughtering one of the little bastards, I'll wake up one night to another visit from the scorpion king...and He won't be happy.