Nothing like a nice quiet Friday night… or maybe not.

It’s about 10pm, I’m sitting under my mosquito net (which is fully tucked in thanks to some cunning maneuvering of a rogue mosquito who managed to get in earlier in the night) watching episodes of 24. It’s the 18th hour of season 3 and things are getting really good. I begin to hear a tapping sound on my ceiling, coming from the space above. I figure it must be a bird or worse, maybe a rat… I try to ignore it because there is nothing I can do and being paranoid won’t help anything. The tapping continues so I pause my episode and listen more closely. At this point I notice that the tapping sound is coming from the portion of my ceiling right where there is a section caving in (i.e. right next to the gaping hole above my bed). Awesome. Still, I try to ignore it. That’s when my friend the bat decides to check out my room. Somehow he manages to flap his way through the hole and proceeds to fly/fall haphazardly around my room. He was crashing into walls, my mosquito net, the ceiling… Meanwhile, I’m under my net crouched in a sitting position trying to keep as far away from all sides as possible. The light in my room is off at the moment so I’m tracking the bat’s movements with my flashlight as best I can. “What am I going to do?!” I text my roommate (who was supposed to be in Nairobi this evening but couldn’t go at the last minute – luckily for me) and tell her about the bat and ask her what I should do.

I hear her come into the hallway, but she can’t come into my room because it’s still locked from the inside. She was calling in encouragement and telling me things like it won’t be able to see if I turn my light on and that bats don’t bite. Having her out in the hallway was enough moral support that after psyching myself up, and waiting for the bat to get on the other side of my bed so that I had a clear path to the door, I lifted up my net and ran for my life (making sure to turn my on light on my way out). So now Mercy and I are in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. We open the kitchen door since it’s the only way to get it out but then we’re stuck for a plan. My response, “Why are there no boys around for this stuff?” After a few minutes I decide we just need to arm ourselves and chase it out of my room, down the hall, into the kitchen and out the door. This would be no easy feat considering there are no ceilings in the hallway or kitchen, but really as long as the bat was out of my room I was alright with the outcome. You may be wondering, “arm themselves with what?” Brooms. They aren’t brooms like American brooms that have sticks though, they are just reeds tied together. Mine was maybe a foot and a half long and Mercy’s was maybe 3, but it was the best we could do. Slowly we forced ourselves to conquer the fear and move into my room. Mr. Bat was on my towel hanging near the middle of my room so we worked our way slowly past to angle in for the chase. I took a swing and our friend was airborne once more. This resulted in screaming and ducking and in both Mercy and I collapsing into my net and onto my bed when Mr. Bat turned into a skilled dive bomber. The racket we were making was bound to draw attention and by the time we got the bat out into the hall my neighbor was in his yard near my window asking what was going on and if we were ok. This was really reassuring to me, though I felt a bit silly confessing that our problem was a bat, because I know if something worse ever did happen it wouldn’t go unnoticed.

When the bat flew out of my room Mercy must have thrown a shoe because our friend was now pinned under a flip flop. He looked pretty solidly trapped, but since he was still moving around I wasn’t entirely convinced. We threw a duster over him and decided I needed to carry him outside. Yikes. I dislike carrying small bugs in tissues if I can feel them moving… how am I supposed to deal with a bat? More mental preparation, then go-time. Yes, that’s right, I picked up Mr. Bat, with his head showing so I could tell he was alright, and threw him out of our kitchen door (complete with duster which I’ll just have to retrieve tomorrow) then promptly slammed it shut. And it turns out, Mercy was wrong, that bat had teeth. I’m not so sure it wouldn’t have bitten me.

I guess we can just add this to the growing list of creepy crawly things we have to chase out of or kill in our house every night. Mercy is the queen of scorpion killing by now. My scorpion tally is only up to 2, but she kills them all the time. Rose also had a bat in her room a while back so I guess that’s the pest of choice on our end of the house. Yuck. We’re going to be war-hardened in no time by all this killing and attacking of the enemy.

UPDATE: Bats have infiltrated both mine and Rose’s rooms since I wrote this and we have now also been dealing with rats and mice. There was a lot of screaming and laughter the week we all got back from vacation as we had to battle the things that had taken up residence in our absence. I now go directly for the broom when there is a bat and start swinging away (but they still scare the shit out of me).