Last night I was cooking up one of the three remaining meals which neither makes me want to starve myself nor costs more than 2,500 shillings to prepare, which I delightfully refer to as “cow pea mash”. Besides the obvious ingredient, this delectable repast is, like approximately 100% of every other meal I have ever consumed in Uganda, entirely made up of tomatoes and onions.
Anyway.
While someone is researching on my behalf the reason for which an ordinary pea is labeled a “cow pea”, and perchance if there should be a goat pea or, at the very minimum, a critical difference between a bull pea and a heifer pea, I’m going to start talking about things that really matter.
Cockroaches.
Many PCVs have a separate place or room to serve as a kitchen or food store. I use the one of my two rooms which doesn’t have my bed in it. So cockroaches basically reign over 50% of my personal space in Uganda.
Well. I grew up in cold, dry Colorado where I frolicked in open meadows (suburbs) wild, barefoot and free (kneepads) with my myriad friends (imaginary)…pleasantly unaware of cockroaches. I’ve grown up into a somewhat functioning adult—still wear kneepads sometimes— who exhibits a bad mix of optimism and self-delusion and who chooses to not believe in the existence of cockroaches. I DO believe in something called “selective reality”, however. Granted, this particular self-deception becomes more difficult when you bug-bomb your house with a “cockroach” spray called DOOM every week and come home to find a scene suggesting some sort of massacre that requires sweeping up. Or when you discover a “cockroach” hideaway and breeding depot in a basin and must drown them in their own lair. Or when you simply find yourself unarmed and absentmindedly killing “cockroaches” with a slap of the bare hand or a crunch of the heel. Emphasis on the crunch.
Lest you think I’m a terrible housekeeper you should know that, while I am NOT the best housekeeper, cockroaches live inside my walls. And there is not a sealed surface in this house, from my door to my windows to the ceiling to the floor. Mmmm, drafty!
So….I’m cooking my cow pea mash when a line of typical baby cockroaches comes scurrying across my cooking table. As I’m bopping them 1-by-1 with the back end of my knife, which I must say feels a little like a carnival game, I come to a halting realization. I’m killing the STUPID cockroaches. The ones who dare to venture in the light for a bit of food, the ones who simply live under the stove instead of stealthily inside the cracks of my wall, the ones who travel in packs. The truly cunning ones are still out there. I’m quite certain I never see THOSE. So, I guess, my real concern here, and what I’m saying is….
What if I am actually hastening some sort of natural selection, cockroach evolution kind of thing? What if I’m contributing to the development of a super-intelligent, near-invincible, possibly charming 007 type of cockroach? I wish I was one of those people who could ignore evolution and open obscure mid-western museums and rewrite the history of “dinosaurs” instead. T-rex was really a gecko, and it died out 37 years ago…that type of thing.
Alas, I can’t. The way I see it, the only way I can excuse myself from the tragically inevitable process of creating some sort of sub-species of Ultra Robo-Roach is to….stop killing cockroaches. Stop worrying about cockroaches. Stop giving myself a headache, and probably DOOM-induced cancer, over cockroaches.
Stop believing in cockroaches.
Yes.
Ooh, peas!
