Oh My God, The Roaches Have Wings!

“The roaches were so large that I could hear their footsteps on the floor”

I’m a city kid and no stranger to your average roach. I’ve spent much of my life in apartments and the downside of sharing your environment with neighbors is that you get to battle the common infestations; mice and roaches. Of course between visits of the exterminator there is that can of Raid that each family carefully conceals in their grocery cart.

And then there’s the water bug, the roaches’ more fearsome counterpart. I’ve heard that in the southern states the roaches grow pretty big but Liberia has the largest cockroaches I’ve ever seen. I soon became accustomed to seeing cockroaches 2 1/2 inches long cutting the corners of a room. Sometimes, at night, as I lay in the quiet darkness of my room I could hear them creeping across the floor.

I remember being horrified when a friend spied a cockroach perched on the arm of her dining room chair. She maintained eye contact with me while with one hand grabbing and swinging a fly swatter, BAM! Only the target took flight and the flurry of those short brown wings that made a buzzing sound was as frightening to me as being sealed in a room with a giant condor.

Early on in our Liberian experience we lived down Lakpazee Road in a quiet residential area where we constantly battled the homegrown roaches that infested the home we shared with two other families. One of the other women and I had both delivered babies within a month of each other and together we struggled with hand washing diapers, breastfeeding and acclimating to life in Liberia. It was difficult enough to keep the kids and the house clean without modern conveniences. The road that ran past our house was unpaved and we constantly swept sand from the floors. But the most disturbing thing was that there were roaches everywhere! If you opened a door or a drawer or moved something that had been stationary for awhile, you set the backfield in motion.

One night, I fell asleep nursing my newborn and I awakened to find two roaches on my exposed breast; one actually perched on my nipple! I became hysterical, my husband, jerked from his sleep by my screams quickly killed both roaches and, although he was almost as disgusted as me (after all he hadn’t been awakened by a cockroach licking milk from his breast), he tried to get me to go back to sleep. There was no freakin way I was going back to sleep! For the rest of that night I sat erect in the living room with all the lights on.

I realized that I’d have to build up my confidence to kill big roaches! When you squash them a thick milky substance oozes out and leaves behind a distinctive odor. I eventually mustered enough courage to grab somebody else’s shoe, to kill the roaches, and finally was able to stomach using thick paper to pick up dead roaches and toss them down the toilet or into the bushes. I observed that they are highly intelligent creatures and, like ants, roaches look after one another. I have witnessed roaches come to retrieve the body of a fallen roach and to hesitate and circle it, as if in grief and finally pull the body away!

The straw that led to our all out assault on the roaches was when our friends, housemates, who had brought hundreds of books with them to Liberia, were rearranging their books and stumbled upon a cockroach nest. That day they killed two dustpans full of roaches in their room and more just seemed to keep coming. That was when we decided that we would wage war! Once we determined that roaches were intelligent we became very aggressive about stepping on them. That sounds cruel but it was a battle of wills and that they needed to know that we weren’t taking no stuff! The roaches in our house were so big and meaty I fancied that one day one of them was going to actually scream while being stepped on.

We searched all the closets and cupboards and killed everything moving, but we s couldn’t understand why we still had so many roaches. The men went outside and looked all around the house and low-and-behold, on the side of our house, there was a bush that had an awful smell. They pulled back the brush and our cracked septic tank teeming with roaches living off the waste in the tank. Everyone felt dirty after an afternoon of killing roaches so we took early showers and sat around nibbling popcorn and discussing how to repair the septic tank.

Meanwhile I recall that one of the men, rode into town the next day and hired an exterminator from the Ministry of Public Works. We had imagined this was going to be an experience quite similar to hiring an exterminator from any one of the pest extermination companies we were familiar with in the states. You know, “Got a Roach, Call Coach, Orkin, or Roach Busters, TNT. We were so wrong!

The exterminator came on a Thursday heightening our anticipation of a weekend without roaches. We were instruction to leave the house for the day and return around 3:00. Upon our return, we were overjoyed to find roaches dead all over the house. We opened our front and back doors and threw open the windows to expel the smell of the fumigation and joined together in the disposal of the dead roaches we found in every crack and cubby hole. However, at dusk we were puzzled by the unnatural silence. Gone was the sound of the crickets and the birds that we normally heard outside our windows in the evening. Shortly thereafter we noticed that not only were the roaches dead but there no longer seemed to be any animal life around our house. Later that night, while mopping the kitchen floor, my friend opened the cabinet under the sink to grab the mop bucket and found a small dead snake. We went to bed that night with mixed feelings.

Early the next morning, when the other women in the house and I were in the backyard washing clothes we found several dead birds lying in the grass. The effects of the exterminator continued to become apparent. We discovered that even the plastic cases that housed our cassette tapes were pitted. And we were saddened when our Lebanese neighbor interrupted our pancake breakfast to tell us that his pet monkey, that we had often played with across the back fence was dead. Obviously no one mentioned the exterminator.

Frightened at the power of the chemical that was used and wondering if we would be affected, my husband hurried to the main road and took a taxi into town to find the exterminator, what he learned confirmed our worst suspicions. Our home had been sprayed with several chemicals, one of which was Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT, a pesticide which although banned in the US in 1972, was perfectly legal in Liberia! He returned home with several pamphlets containing information about DDT and after reviewing it we made a joint decision. We reluctantly threw away all the food we had stored in cardboard boxes and plastic bags that had been exposed to the spraying.

It was an utter catastrophe for us! When we immigrated to Liberia we knew we’d be saying goodbye to the foods we were accustomed to. But we were vegetarians and wanted to bring our favorite food staples to tide us over until we found the local equivalent. Now, that our food had been contaminated by the DDT we tossed out pounds of Soy milk powder, organic cashews, pecans, almonds and sunflower seeds in addition to whole wheat flour, organic soaps; everything had to be thrown away! In fact we dug a huge whole in the backyard and buried it to keep locals from going on the dump and thinking it was good food and carrying it away. All we were able to keep were a few pounds of nuts and soy powder we had stored in Ball glass jars.

This was an expensive wake up call for us. Although DDT is a deadly chemical and stays in the soil for years after it is dispensed, to date, it is still considered the most effective chemical in the fight against malaria which is a deadly scourge in parts of Africa.

The loss of our imported food actually helped us become more creative in learning to prepare Liberian foods which we had initially snubbed our noses at. I guess you could say we had our security blanket ripped away.