Third World Rodeo

I know a lot of the stuff that I talk about on here isn’t actually directly referring to life in Haiti, but more life in general. Today I have a treat for you.

I hate twitchy animals. Anything that can scurry or slither is not something I want to be around for any length of time. I can’t help it, it’s just the way it is. And then I move to a country where we have mice and rats that we learn to keep at bay, and lizards that not only run around our yard, but that we also welcome into our homes because they eat the bugs. And, they’re usually more afraid of us than we are of them.

Until they’re not.

I just had a shiver run through my body as I was thinking about the next words to type.

No, I don’t do well with twitchy things. Especially not when they decide to be brave and run up and then back down my bare legs, or over my feet, or jump onto my head and run in circles. I kid you not – all of those things have happened, and every time it was a little lizard. Yes, I could have squashed it, but instead I resorted to flailing and shuddering. And maybe some jumping and dancing. There’s the shiver again.

Today I had some friends over. Friends that have been away all summer and finally (finally!) came back to me, and now my life is complete again. We spent a fun afternoon catching up with each other like ladies do. These friends are my “loud” friends. When we’re together the volume goes up right along with the laughter. We’re good at laughing at life, at each other, and ourselves.

As the afternoon drew to a close I went to hop in the van with one friend to take her and her daughter home. I was chatting with a neighbor through the fence while she buckled the kids in and threw her stuff on the front seat. As we both turned to get ready to climb in she said, “Um, there’s a lizard on the dash…”

Sure enough, he was just hanging out there. I had parked the van on the grass because the guys had been moving trucks around and fixing tires and there hadn’t been enough room to park where I usually do. There was a small tree right next to it and we’d left the passenger window open. The little monster must have run along a branch and into the window thinking he’d just found a palace.

I don’t remember what I used, but my first instinct was to start swatting at the dash to make our new “friend” run back to where he came. My friend grabbed her shoe and started whacking the dash from her side to help in the efforts. He wasn’t having any of that and rather than staying on track and just jumping outside, he jumped all right, but onto the seat. And then he scurried.

He scurried all the way under the drivers seat.

There was no way. Out of sight was NOT out of mind in this case, and there was no freaking way I was going to sit on him and just assume that he wouldn’t be running down my legs at any point in the trip there and back.

I whipped my seat into the farthest forward position to try to see him. I crouched down and scanned. And there he was, his two beady little eyes staring back at me. I may have yelled, “He’s here! And he’s looking right at me!!!”

This. This is what I didn’t want happening anywhere on my body*.

I reached down and grabbed a very meager looking twig off the ground, then jammed that thing under and around the seat whacking whatever I could until our lizard friend ran out and down and back over to the other side of the van, this time on the floor.

Now would be a good time to mention that loud friends don’t become quiet friends in a crisis – they become louder friends. Somewhere around the time that he hit the deck Peggy yelled “What are y’all making so much noise about out there?!?!” from our house. We were in fits of hysterical laughter with undertones of squeamish terror by this point.

I ran out and yelled that there was a lizard running around in the van. It was also about this point that I remembered that our guard and the neighbor I’d been talking to were only a few feet away watching all this go down.

I ran back to van to find my friend waving her shoe around on the floor to try and flick the lizard out of her side. I did the calculations. It wasn’t much space and I could tell the awkwardness of her flailing arm was because she knew that if she was successful there was a good chance she would get him out, but that he would fly into her in the process of making his exit.

And then it happened.

Unless you’ve had first hand experience with these lizards, it’s very shocking the first time you see it. What am I referring to?

The tail drop.

Yep, these little guys will just drop off a part of themselves when they feel danger lurking. The whole idea is that it’s most likely that a predator will grab for the tail, so they can drop their tail and still run away.

Apparently my friend was a worthy foe because that tail dropped. Right there on the floor board. And then proceeded to wriggle and squiggle. She got momentarily distracted by this phenomenon until I started yelling to keep whacking. She flicked the twitching tail out of the van, not hitting herself, and went back to work on getting our castaway out. Her attempts were futile. He headed for the underside of the dash.

We knew where he went, and we looked at each other, then at the piece of plastic that wasn’t very firmly attached to the bottom of the dash and both grabbed at the same time, and I flung it out of my side onto the grass. She whacked with her shoe and I flicked with my stick. I stuck the key in the ignition and raised my foot awkwardly to push on the clutch to start the van, thinking maybe the vibration and noise would drive him out. He was nowhere.

We looked. I jabbed with the stick. She saw him for a brief moment, hanging out on a wire, and then he was gone again.

We looked at each other across the seat, defeated.

“How brave are you?” I asked.

We reattached the dash piece. She put her shoe back on. I put my seat back in the right position. We adjusted ourselves. She rebuckled Alex, who had undone himself to watch our rodeo. We climbed up gingerly and buckled ourselves. Closed our doors.

As I put the van in gear I looked over, and there’s my friend, sitting cross legged on her seat.

And, all I can think about is how jealous I am, because a) I’m driving and don’t get the option of doing that without my feet on the floor, and b) I’m not that flexible.

We pull out of the driveway and onto the road.

“I’m just going to apologize in advance if I start screaming and whip the car over to the side of the road. And, I’m thankful that you’ll be totally okay with that.”

If the van has a funky smell in a few days, at least I’ll know why.

~Leslie

PS – If you click on the photo you can go visit the blog where that photo was first posted. It just so happens that a Google search on “haiti lizards” brought that up, and the post was written by friends of ours up in the north. Haiti is a small place :)