Third Week of September

It is almost mean how big the spiders are here. How big and how numerous. I am living in one of the most notoriously spider-infested homes of Peace Corps Malawi. Though Haakon’s sister and I convinced him to kill some of the more obvious spiders. And when I moved in I swept the many exoskeletons off the walls, and removed almost every item in the living room and kitchen to clean behind and under everything, they just keep showing up. Just when I think I’ve seen the biggest of them an even bigger one runs across the wall. Or pokes its legs out of my favorite box of tea. Like just now as I was sitting in my bed propped up on some pillows I glimpsed a tell-tale scurry out of the corner of my eye. A spider considerably larger than my palm had crept out from BEHIND MY PILLOWS. Though I was able to get in a few good sprays of Doom the poisoned scoundrel escaped under the shelves next to my bed and I have resigned myself to yet another night of spider plagued dreams. Three months of living in Malawi telling myself it is ridiculous to be scared of spiders and I still stop breathing every time I see one, sometimes frightened even to the point of nausea or dizziness. 

            My arachnophobia is so great it ranked with ‘missing family and friends’ in reasons not to join the Peace Corps. I once slept on a couch for a week to avoid a spider in my room. In Kindergarten a spider crawled out of my tennis shoe onto my hand, so I checked my shoes every single day until high school and still do sometimes. One of my earliest memories is a nightmare where I was Goldilocks and had to choose between staying in the Three Bears’ house with a spider and going outside where the forest was on fire. Occasionally some shoddy arachnophobe attempts to compete with me, swapping anecdotes as evidence of our fear. These challenges inevitable end in the other party suggesting a change of subject because I have obviously started to sweat and red blotches are cropping up on my neck. What I’m saying here is, I’m pretty scared of spiders.

            Yet here I am, just living away in this African spider den. And though writing the above paragraphs has given me cottonmouth, I can now sleep peacefully in a house I know is filled with spiders (Well as peacefully as you can sleep with leaves and fruits falling on your tin roof and birds nesting above your head). I know there is one

living behind the map in my sitting room, one is behind the picture next to my table. I know they come in the windows at night and under the roof during the day. I still believe arachnids are the physical manifestation of evil on earth, but I also believe in balance. Some spiders are good of course—they do at least eat other bugs. And killing every spider in Africa is a slowly failing strategy so it stands to reason that I will somehow have to learn to adopt the fiends into my perception of reality instead of trying to make reality fit my perception. Living in harmony with spiders I don’t think I could have ever achieved. I think mainly because absolute necessity is the only force strong enough to face this fear. It turns out that absolute necessity can make you do almost anything you don’t want to do. So, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko. You know what they say—Grant me the serenity to accept the spiders I cannot kill, the courage to kill the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.