Cockroach-Gate

When I was little and living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, my mother, with the best of intentions, rented a kids’ movie from the commissary to entertain me.  This movie, rated PG, was called Mouse Hunt, and involved two stooge-like characters in a never-ending battle against a mouse that lived in a decrepit mansion they had inherited.

You would think that beginning my blog post in such a way that I will be describing a similar farcical adventure akin to Wile Coyote’s fruitless but fearless pursuit of the roadrunner.  While it’s true that I recently discovered there is a furry brown rodent living in my house (and I think, often, under my bed), that is not what I wish to address in this blog post.

As a brief aside, however, yes, there is a mouse in my house, and I spot him frequently.  Though he terrified me the first time, I have grown accustomed to his whiskered face.  I have locked away all of my foods either in my cabinet or my fridge, but there didn’t seem to be any nibbles anyway, and see few droppings which leads me to believe he doesn’t live in my house proper, but perhaps somewhere nearby.  His name is Theodore, and there will be more about him later.

Today, I would like you to imagine the fanciest hotel in Hossana.  This is the hotel where all Peace Corps staff like to stay whenever they visit my humble town.  They have the most extensive menu of any hotel or restaurant in town.  They are the only establishment that offers pizza, and only on the occasion that they have the cheese and electricity available to make it.

I have been to this hotel restaurant four times in a row since Saturday, where I dined there with my site mate, a Group 5 health sector volunteer named Deanna.  For reference, I’m two generations after Deanna in Group 7.  Deanna is ten weeks from COSing – closing her service and moving back to the States.  She has been in this country for two years almost to the day, and since arrival has suffered through a number of medical conditions from typhoid to giardia.  She is fearless in the face of anything Ethiopia has to throw at her, being a seasoned veteran of its trenches and germ warfare.  That Saturday, she was returning from a week-long trip starting in Hawassa for a 7k marathon, then three days of hiking and horseback riding in the Bale Mountains, followed by another night in Hawassa and some time in Addis, so she was pretty exhausted.  We dined on steak sandwiches, on account of our favorite menu item, pizza, was not available that day.  I also asked for fish, but there was none.

The following day, I met another ferengi at this restaurant, Victoria.  Victoria, from Newcastle, is one of two local VSO volunteers who arrived a few months after I did in September 2012.  She tries to work up at the college with me, but finds she is more appreciated and gets more done at the university and local deaf school.  Victoria had joined Deanna on this trip through the mountains, and was equally tired.  She and I split a chicken pizza, which was delicious.  Still no fish.

Then it was back to the college on Monday, where I met up with the IFESH volunteer, Melissa, who spent a lot of time in New York City before coming here in November 2012.  When the lunch bell rang, we also headed for Lemma where we ran into Deanna and Victoria and joined them for lunch.  Victoria wasn’t eating, but Melissa ordered a fasting pizza – all veggies, no cheese, and I ordered some t’ibs, a local Ethiopian meat dish.  Deanna ordered a steak sandwich but it never showed up until way later, and the fries she ordered were undercooked.  Still no fish.

Which brings us to today, when the four of us met yet again at Lemma for lunch.  To reiterate, Deanna, who has been here for two years, is tied with my other PC site mate, Christina for being here the longest time.  I come in second, as I approach my one year mark.  Then Victoria, who’s been here nearly nine months, and lastly Melissa.  This order is important, and you will later learn why.  The four of us settled in for a hearty lunch at Lemma, all of us starving.  Victoria and Deanna decided to split a chicken pizza and Melissa got her standard fasting pizza, trying and failing to get them not to put mushrooms on it.  Me, I ordered the beef goulash and it was delicious.  For a while, we were talking and laughing and everything was fine.

And then disaster struck.

In Mouse Hunt, the two protagonists were forced to deal with this mansion when they lost their jobs running a restaurant in New York City.  How did they lose their jobs?  Well, the mayor came to dine at their restaurant, and it didn’t end well for him.  In fact, it ended in his death.  Because you see, the restaurant was not up to health codes, and as such a cockroach managed to get into the mayor’s food, which I believe was spaghetti.  He was eating away until one of his daughters commented on something gross in his food.  Taking his fork away, the mayor saw that he had bitten into a cockroach, its back half still squirming.  His eyes bulge, he has a heart attack and dies.  Being a child, I didn’t understand the nuances of this scene.  For example, I missed the fact that the mayor had a heart attack, and thought that his cause of death was ingesting a cockroach.  This one scene in an otherwise forgettable children’s comedy scarred me for life.

In case you have never visited, Tashkent, Uzbekistan is rife with all sorts of interesting insects and arachnids from aphids to scorpions.  And after going away for the summer, we came back to find our basement infested with roaches, so they weren’t an insect I was exactly unfamiliar with.  Upon seeing this film, for weeks I would dig through the food my parents lovingly prepared for me.  It came to the point when I was digging through some pasta of my own when I recall my mother saying in exasperation, “Carlin, I made that myself, there are NO bugs in that pasta!”

I don’t remember how long I went about dutifully inspective every piece of food that went into my mouth, but clearly since then I have got over my fears.  Still, the scene from Mouse Hunt remains with me to this day, and this is a child who survived Total Recall and It without any nightmares.  But Mouse Hunt got to me.

This story is important for you to understand the significance of the event that took place at Lemma International Hotel on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at approximately 1:30PM.  We were eating.  I had already finished my goulash, and the pizzas had recently come out because they take a while to cook.  My three companions were munching away when all of a sudden I noticed Deanna staring intently at the pizza.  She moved her face physically closer to it to get a better look and our conversation gradually ebbed away until I asked her, “What are you looking at?”

Deanna didn’t respond.  She simply squints at the food, then takes a knife and slowly pokes at something baked into the cheese.  We three move closer ourselves to get a better look and at pretty much the exact same time we all recoil with various cries of disbelief and disgust.

A cockroach had been baked into the pizza, and was blending in with the bits of mushroom, herbs and roast chicken.

Melissa is so put off by this that she has to stand up and walk away from the table, after loudly exclaiming “No!” like Luke Skywalker upon hearing who his father was.  By now, all I know is I am laughing and I think Deanna is laughing too, while Victoria just doesn’t look happy.

“I saw it, too,” she said later, “but I had been hoping it was some bit of hair, or maybe an odd mushroom.”  She’d seen Deanna looking at it in her head and had begged her not to expose it for what it was, hoping to live in denial just a little while longer.

Deanna reached over to take the roach out and keep eating, but Victoria called over the waiter.  Both of them pointed at the incriminating evidence and the waiter immediately whisked the pizza away.  Deanna expressed her desire to keep eating, but Victoria explained that she could.  Melissa eventually came back to the table and looked at her own pizza in dismay.  Despite all of our urgings that the roach wasn’t in HER pizza, she still insisted it must have crawled over it to get to Deanna and Victoria’s pizza.  She starts talking about how because they were in the same oven, roaches obviously must have crawled over it, and must be crawling everywhere in that oven.

“Melissa,” I said, “that doesn’t make sense.  Ovens are hot, you can’t crawl all over them like that.  No, it’s more likely it crawled on it on the prep table and then just got baked in.”  My logic did nothing to reassure her.

In the meantime, Victoria was trying hard not to think about all the diseases cockroaches carry and all the reasons they’re gross.  “Ethiopia carries diseases,” Deanna pointed out nonchalantly.

“Yes,” Victoria returned, “but I don’t put Ethiopia in my mouth!”

By this point, for my part, I just found the whole thing hilarious, and Deanna maintained her desire to have kept eating once the pest had been removed.  “Who cares?” she said. “I’m hungry!”

“That’s why you get so many bacterial infections!” said Victoria.

Deanna and Victoria eventually ordered a steak sandwich instead and began to munch on it.  I commented on how proud I was of myself that I could laugh at this situation, considering my traumatic history with cockroaches and food.  Then again, I admitted, the roach wasn’t in my food.  Victoria pointed out that it must be Ethiopia that has changed us, as Deanna confessed that two years ago, she would have reacted just as Melissa had.  Victoria says that Deanna, who has been here the longest, is the most unfazed, followed by me who found it funny and started talking about gross things roaches did as a matter of wonder while Melissa and Victoria tried not to be sick.  Then there’s Victoria, who is somewhat fazed by the incident, bothered enough by it to send the whole pizza back, and then lastly, there’s Melissa, who was so disgusted she had to physically distance herself from the table before she could calm down and was thinking of swearing off Lemma’s food entirely.

“But then,” Victoria began with a chuckle, “where are you going to eat, Melissa?”

If this experience has taught me anything is that I have learned to laugh at just about any disgusting thing that roles my way.  I’m following in Deanna’s footsteps and will probably be willing to eat anything once the offending object has been removed, whether that’s a fly in my soda, or a cockroach in my pizza.  In fact, I’m halfway there, having fished out many-a-fly from my beverages in the past.  I, too, probably would have eaten the pizza, just not the bit where the roach had been, while Deanna insisted that she would have even eaten that part, once she’d picked it out.

It does make me wonder, though.  If Deanna extended for a third year, would she reach the point where she would have found the roach… and eaten the whole thing anyway?  I mean, hey, we do need the protein.

So what’s the grossest thing you’ve ever done?  What do you think would be the grossest thing you’d be willing to do, after living in a developing country for a year?