Pest control

I am seriously considering starting a pest control company out here. Every kind of pest seems to have made its presence felt in the last twenty-four hours.

Flies have plagued us for a little while now. They seem impervious to being shooed away and have been driving me nuts as I’ve been working in the office. I have a can of fly spray on the desk now and am beginning to worry about the satisfaction I get from watching the flies dropping off the desk as I blast them. The situation has escalated on the compound. One of our older girls came to see me this afternoon to request fly spray to drive the flies away from the kitchen. We will have to carry out a serious investigation to find out where the flies are coming from.

I have heard it said that in England you are never very far away from a rat. That certainly seems to be the case in my house at the moment. As I was tidying up in the kitchen this morning I noticed some rat droppings which suggested that at least one of our furry friends has re-discovered my supplies. To add insult to injury there were also rat droppings in the in tray on my desk. I think they had probably dropped through the gap on the ceiling board. The thought of a rat flicking through my files is a bit mind-boggling. The rat trap and poison will have to be dusted off!

Snakes are the other nuisance that are usually fairly close to all of us in this part of Kenya. I had an interesting night last night. At about midnight I decided to investigate a noise on the compound that had been bugging me for a couple of hours. It sounded like something creaking by one of the girls dorms. I positioned myself at the back of the dorm, listening as hard as I could to try and discover the source of the noise. As I looked down to the ground I noticed a two-foot long mamba slithering from the back door of the dorm towards the barbed wire fence that separates our compound from the neighbouring field. It wasn’t a very thick-bodied snake and it moved fairly gracefully, almost hypnotically. I was standing, (at this point very still), about three feet away from the snake. It paid no attention to me and must have been very surprised when one of our night guards appeared the neighbour’s side of the fence and bashed its brains out.

I’m hoping there won’t be too many other pests to deal with over the next few days. The rats and snakes are, to be honest, irritants as much as anything. Occupational hazards that, very literally, come with the territory. It would be nice to have a bit of a break from the flies though. I’m running out of fly spray and seem to be developing a twitch triggered by the flies buzzing near my ear.