The Mouse Who Prefers Dark Chocolate...

 “We have a mouse,” the text says….
 “Have you named it?"  I reply.
 “Skid.” 
“Did you or did he – skid, that is?” I asked.

At the time I was half-way through my first solo bus ride back to Gulu.  I mention “solo” because I had been dreading this – we all dread travel.  But traveling with someone is always not only more fun,  it is – well – easier.  The Post Bus (the post office’s version of the Pony Express) leaves at 8AM and  to get a seat other than being sandwiched in over the rear axle means walking in Kampala in the dark.  As usual before a day of travel I have slept poorly, but it wouldn’t have mattered because the housekeeping staff woke me at 4AM by banging cleaning buckets.  I wonder if – like Nurse Ratched - they don’t all secretly harbor a dislike for the inmates in this asylum.

So I packed up, took a safe route to the bus (zero-dark-thirty now) and stopped by Brood, a bakery that makes real Croissants (not just somehow) and grabbed a ham and cheese version along with an apple muffin – both seriously good I might add.  Good bread and pastries are always a surprise and lend one an incongruous feeling of safety.  I arrived early to get a seat by a window, because like a dog, I have to have wind blowing in my face when riding in a vehicle.  (Go ahead - I know there will be commentary on this.)  Having purchased my ticket the day before, the process was made easier.  AND – I discovered with great delight and deep gratitude that the travel pillow I’d forgotten on the bus-ride from Gulu over 6 weeks ago had been turned into Lost and Found.   (Ugandans are by-in-large amazingly honest folks and I have gone back to retrieve any number of items I’ve left somewhere – from water bottles to cell-phones.)

By 6:30 people are already there for the 8AM bus.  Negotiating a bathroom stop (called a Short Call for #1, Long call for #2)) is the next challenge I’d begun dreading and the reason we like traveling in packs. Always good to have someone watching your stuff.   This probably falls under the category of TMI, but if you don’t have someone to guard your stuff, ya’ gotta’ take it with you.  It’s not the 99% of honest people you worry about, it’s that other 1%.  (I’m remembering that years ago in Italy, I was robbed in a Pension by another American tourist – not a local.) Trying to negotiate a filthy latrine with two back packs and a purse hanging off off you could mean disaster.   Stories  abound about people slipping into a latrine hole - not to mention the one about the latrine floor collapsing plunging a PCV into deep S*** literally.  No you don’t want to sit anything on the floor either. And don't forget your money - there’s a fee for going to pee – 200 Shillings.  Extra for toilet paper I presume. 

Back to the bus.  Miraculously I don’t have a seatmate so this is turning out OK.  Somewhere after the Short Call I caught a whiff of alcohol wafting up from the back of the bus.  Not long after that, someone ambled unsteadily to the front and I began hearing a voice that sounded like a bad radio on high volume.  It was just after the Hallelujahs that I discovered this dis-embodied voice was attached to the person of a snaggle-toothed disciple.  I heard – in Acholi – that “people are bad, people are rotten and people are hard.”   Sounding more and more (except for the Acholi) like the  Monte Santo Baptist church we attended growing up in Baton Rouge, I’m now grateful for – at the age of 5 -  having  chosen to sing the jingle for a beer commercial  (Hello mellow Jax little darlin’– you’re the beer for me, yessiree”…) in Sunday School one day: resulting in our excommunication from that realm of the sacred.   Our roving preacher continued, but I remained unperturbed because I’m already in Hell and … I have an empty seat next to me, Cheese Ritz crackers and a warm Coke as we inch toward my Home away from Home.  Extra variety in scenery was provided by the Baboons crouching along the   road side after the Nile - the Vervet monkeys having had squatting rights on the way over.

Staying at the Annex makes one glad to be back home where you don’t have to share a bathroom and there are no mid-night maids, though there IS the resounding thud of bass music, one of the benchmarks of Uganda life everywhere but the bush.  But water “is finished” again and this will mean hauling and flushing the toilet with bath water.

Falling into bed early, I climbed under the net and tucked into yet another murder mystery, using the book-light, because electricity is also ‘finished.” I heard an ever-so-slight munching noise coming from the bookcase in my bedroom corner.   Extricating myself from the enclosure, I tiptoed over to find the source.  Looking in three boxes of fabulous crunchy granola bars that I covet and have moved to the mouse-free-zone (mistake) in the bedroom, I noticed a tiny thread of mouse-tail sticking up in one of them.  Distinctly non-granola in nature, I surmised it to be the rat-fink that gnawed into my Crunchy Dark Chocolate Nature Valley Granola bars two weeks ago.  Stealth-like, I closed the top and held it down while the little F***er  scrambled to get out.  I called to my housemate to unlock the front door so I could humanely release the greedy little rodent into the wild.  (I’m not quite up to more visceral forms of mouse execution yet, but this event is moving me ever closer to the death-penalty. Think  of Willard, not Ratatouille.)  Finding the keys in the dark, holding both mouse-trap (aka granola box) and flashlight while we unlock the door, I put the box on the front porch – not wanting to fling it out into the bushes because I STILL HAVE GRANOLA BARS in there. The little  S*** darted out and ran across a foot and BACK INTO THE HOUSE.  And thus was pounded another nail in the coffin of humane attitudes. 

Curiously, this mouse has – to our knowledge – eaten nothing but my Dark Chocolate Granola Bars.  Damn him. I didn’t even know they (these particular granola bars) existed until Travis and Lori sent them and now I’m hooked – but so is the mouse. This means war and it will be a fight to the death.  Shall we use a standard mousetrap, the glue kind, the poison tablets???  This was a matter of great debate last night among three of us as we sat with beers in hand.  Although the walls are concrete, this tiny creature with teeth like Jaws has managed to gnaw a substantial hole into the wall next to my bedroom door. The point being,  I/we don’t want it to crawl in and die (and therefor stink).  Neither do we want to watch it die slowly – as in the glue method.  Mouse-trap???  I haven’t seen one in Uchumi…   

So it’s another day in Gulu. Today’s task is to find a mousetrap.  The Marching Band has tuned up and we’ve been treated to several rounds of the Ugandan National Anthem; there’s something like military marching chants coming from around the District Offices and Kat is looking mournful outside unbeknownst to her that  lunch awaits inside my house.   If only she could make herself trust the bizarre looking Mzungus inside – we would even serve relish.