The Hotsprings

It wasn't very long into dating the Mountain Man that he started talking about the hot springs. We were comparing camping war stories, and I told him I'd spent a lot of my memorable childhood camping in King's Canyon in the summertime. "Oh, that's a great area," he said in his casual, friendly way. It is a tone of his that I now recognize often belies much more knowledge and depth of experience on the subject than he will point out. "Let's go camping out that way. See the hot springs."

Now, we had only been dating for about a month and the thing about internet dating is that not only is it about getting to know somebody completely blind of having met them before, you also don't share any friends or a social circle. So I did the most logical thing I could (naturally) to attempt to safeguard myself against my lack of experience with this random internet person that I'd only been dating for a month.

"Can I bring Zoey?" See, because in my little world, if somebody is cool with your dog, that person is just cool. Don't ask me if it makes logical sense. Not to mention, Zoey is the dog equivalent of a 50 pound bunny rabbit with permanent symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer's. Occasionally she completely short-circuits and somehow manages to start by casually scratching herself behind her ear and end by deathgripping the base of her tail to attack "the dog kicking her ear" while violently kicking herself in the head in order to "get the dog biting her tail" to let go. Look, I can't explain her but she IS pretty cute.

Never having seen my dog before, he thought about my request for a quick moment, then shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

Dear casual internet passersby: Don't go camping with random men just because they say your dog can come.

So, not knowing what I was getting into at all, but secure in being able to bring my adorable airheaded cheerleader, I packed to go "to the hot springs". Zoe jumps into the back of his 4-Runner like her butt's on fire and I pop into the passenger's side to go "out towards King's Canyon to the hotsprings". At this point, my little understanding of what is happening has completely evolved past the reality of the situation. 

So we drive. And we drive. And we drive. And as I do have distinct childhood memories of just HOW LONG it took to get out that way on the log scale of HOW ANNOYING my brother was the entire time, so I'm pretty much cool with this. Eventually, however, the rational pessimist in my brain manages to slither slowly up from the Swamp of Uncomfortable Truths that I have mostly managed to ignore my entire day-to-day life.

Who is this guy, she hisses, it's getting dark. 

He's fine! I shoot back. We'll be at the campground soon! There will be lots of other people because there are always tons of people at campgrounds on the weekend!

Right about this moment, Mountain Man points out a car we're passing on the 395. I know that guy, he says, I climb with him. I take this as a good sign. My rational pessimist is unconvinced but momentarily silenced. She coils up to watch this new story unfold.

It gets dark and we keep driving. Finally I ask when we're going to get there. Pretty soon, he tells me, maybe in an hour. It's midnight. Where the heck are we going? I just nod, though. I mean, I'm in this far. What am I going to do, fling open the car door and hurl myself out of the car at 65 mph? Demand to stop on the side of the road and, what, hitchhike home? We've passed Lone Pine a while ago already. I reach back and scratch Zoey behind the ears.

Another 40 minutes go by and we turn left off onto the loneliest, darkest, unpaved road that I have ever seen in my entire life. There is no ranger station along this road, no orderly campground, nothing but dim moonlight, a light breeze, and more nothing.

We have to make a right turn when you see the tree in the distance, he tells me. Look for the tree. When you first see it way in the distance, that's when we turn right.

My rational pessimist is rattling her tail and her head is weaving back and forth. Look for the tree way in the distance? Excuse me, but, what the hell?

Ten minutes down the road, nothing. Twenty minutes, nothing. Should I even be looking for anything at all or should I be furiously plotting my escape?

Thirty minutes. I am in silent panic. I attempt to console myself. It's been a good run, I think. They were 28 great years. Really. And it's then that I recognize a moment that has happened to me on rare occasion in my long and winding travels. I think, either this will kill me or it will change my life.

.........
..............
....................

We keep driving ... and driving ... and then! What?! A TREE. Off in the distance to the right.

Mountain Man, completely oblivious to my silent existential deliberations, simply brightens. There it is! He turns right off onto a near-invisible dirt path.

It isn't, however, until I see the first car or two parked along the side of the little rutted road, that I begin to truly calm down. Mountain Man is miffed, though. If it's this full, where will we camp, he grumbles. Pretty soon the road opens out to a little cleared area full of scattered parked cars.

We manage to find a back corner to park the car, unload a few tubs, and make a makeshift bed in the back of the 4-Runner. I have no idea where I am. In the morning, I open my eyes to this:

Empty BLM land as far as the eye can see.

That morning, we drove out for a hike up at elevation:

   

Exactly One Year and 11 Months Later

Well, it's been a really long time. Almost two years ago, I sat down to use this blog to untangle my complex emotions about the death of a wonderful Georgian teacher. My blog posts in Georgia came when the mood struck me--and only then. Not like it was any different before, honestly. Even after deleting my Facebook profile in a fit of emotional despair a year into my service, I didn't really consider posting more frequently to make up the difference. Sorry, mom! Sometimes this blog seems integral to my life and ability to process who I am, and, sometimes, despite all kinds of very empty personal promises and threats I make with my inner writing psyche, I just forget about it completely for years.

April 21, 2008 was my first post ever here, which means this goofy, erratic little blog is coming up on its 8 year birthday. I should do something to commemorate the day like bake a cake, then plan to bake a cake every week for the rest of my life, then completely forget about that promise until a completely random date far, far in the future.

Two years ago, I was walking with a strange sense of the inevitable out of my life in Georgia. March 1st would have been the beginning of the end of the winter, only four months before I ate my last true khatchapuri and hugged my Georgian family goodbye. March 1st was beginning of the end of my service in the Peace Corps, which has had a more lasting impact on my personality, opinions, friendships, and day-to-day minutia habits than I could have ever imagined. As I've stated in this blog before, I expected only adventure. What I got instead has redefined my understanding of the depth of human experience.

Now, two years later, The Mountain Man in my life has possibly succeeded in pestering me to document our wild, windblown experiences as we weekend wander our way anywhere we can manage to drive from OC Basecamp. Let the potentially, but not statistically likely, consistent posts commence!

Confusion

"Ala, tomorrow I am sure that there will not be the normal lesson at school."  I'm sitting on my counterpart's sofa around 8:30 pm, just another normal Monday night.  I nod, slowly, glad for the information and fighting the wave of frustration for the fact that I still need to be told at all.  Not instinctively knowing the pattern of social movement often makes me feel like I just signed up to spend two years wandering around a dark house-- bumping into every wall and step.

As I already feel like I've spent the whole day tripping over figurative steps, the frustration quickly dissolves into something much closer to resignation and perhaps a little too similar to defeat.  Our school's beloved math and physics teacher passed away two days ago, and my whole community is mourning.  This is the first time in Georgia that I have been to a wake for someone I felt like I knew.  Sadly, his death was caused by what appears to have been the result of a botched stomach operation, although nobody is clear on the details.  There is, at least, a theme I can cling to here-- when it comes to medical problems, nobody is ever clear on the details.  Everyone regards my pointed American questions with pity.  They know that I was not raised with the concept of resignation to lack of information.  They can see that "nobody knows" is something I struggle to accept.  In a way they're correct, of course, and in a way I think that they just don't see how much "gray area" I have already resigned myself to.

When there is a wake like this, for example, the students and teachers split into groups and travel together.  People often forget to tell me where they are going, when they are going (or that they are going at all), and even more than that I am confused as to "how" I should go.  As a student with my students?  As a teacher with the teachers?  Certainly I more naturally fall into the "teacher" category, but I am so much closer with my students both in age and comfort level that I always hesitate.  I've lived the past two years in the sidewalk crack between child and adult, family member and guest, teacher and student, American and Georgian, alien and familiar.  I am clearly independent and also clearly helpless.  I am cherished help and a huge responsibility.  I can clearly speak Georgian and communicate ... and I also clearly cannot.  In the category box of my life, I check "Other: Please Describe" and write nothing on the line below.

And so I float.  Or stumble.  Or sit static and feeling useless until I can see another path to traverse.  The first time I go to the wake, I go with my students piled in a marshutka trundling up the mountain to the house of our deceased teacher's family.  On the way back down, my seventh grade host sister sits in my lap.  The second time I go, I elect to wait for the teachers-- I am unsure as to exactly why I do it, but I think it has a lot to do with my general discomfort with the situation.  I feel less guilty when I am quiet and noncommittal around the teachers.  Like less of an awkward social burden.  I finally leave the wake alone, after seeing our math teacher in a casket in the living room.  He is so transparently white and he's dressed in an immaculately pressed iron grey suit.  It seems to me as if the suit has more substance than he does.  Seeing him lifts me from my own self-centered confusion to remember a man who was exceptionally kind to everyone and deserved far more than doctors who refused to explain their mistake.  So much confusion.

Confusion pervades life here.  

Adjara, specifically.  I have come to learn that is its own beast in terms of Georgian culture.  I remember in training we had a session on "regional stereotypes"-- one region was full of "fast talkers", one was "hick", one was known for silly things-- like having lots of donkeys.  I had just gotten my site placement, so I was eagerly awaiting what they had to say "about us".  When they got to my region, though, the people at the front of the room just shrugged.  "They were invaded by Turkey."  I remember thinking, even then, that that was a strange, distant way to characterize a region.  All of the other ones were personal, but not Adjara.  They had nothing on Adjara.

Then I got here and slowly realized that it wasn't just that Adjara didn't have a stereotype: people in other parts of Georgia have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  In my first year here, I often tried to describe social patterns and attitudes that I encountered to other Peace Corps volunteers as potential barriers to joint projects.  My understanding of my village and our culture here was often met with disbelief, puzzlement, and occasionally hostility.  After all, the rest of Georgia is quite homogeneous in terms of cultural attitudes and religious practices.  Other people naturally thought that I was crying wolf, being too sensitive, or just generally completely misunderstanding my surroundings.  Then, when my friend's host grandmother died here, he called Peace Corps to ask about local funeral traditions.  The staff replied that they honestly didn't know what they were.  The things he described were strange to them.  They could tell him about traditional Georgian practices, but what they were saying had no bearing on what was happening in his house.

It was asking about funeral practices that solidified another growing realization: people in these mountains have no idea what is going on in these mountains.  That the region has a Muslim history due to centuries of Ottoman control, everyone knows.  Most elderly people in the village are Muslim and most younger people are converting to Georgian Orthodox in order to return to their own cultural roots.  This, we know here.  After this we begin to tread on suppositions and observation.  Most people high in the mountains do not have internet and do not communicate with communities outside of this mountain range.  This means that the independent religious movement of these mountains, although vaguely self-aware, is not progressing in any kind of organized fashion.  What it is is a group of people returning to roots that their great grandparents can no longer describe to them.  Even more confusing is the fact that so many people here were forcibly converted to Islam long ago under Ottoman rule and many did not adopt a "pure" version of the religion.  Thus the practice of Islam varies from village to village throughout the region.

Even more, Georgians in these mountains have a general rule of thumb about funerals and the deceased: regardless of the religious beliefs or religious conversion of the younger members of the family, all older members should be remembered and mourned in the religion that they practiced during their lifetime.  This means that even with the conversion to Georgian Orthodox, younger family members are still socially required to celebrate Muslim holidays in order to properly honor the dead.  This causes confusion when a Christian family is unsure of how to perform an old Muslim tradition.  Even more, the middle generation acts as a kind of "gap year" and generally isn't very religious.  All questions about how to properly perform Muslim rites must be asked to the elderly themselves-- and their opinions may differ greatly from village to village.  So in light of all of this, in order to perform funeral rites that families are unsure of, what should they do?

Side-by-side with the Muslim holidays, we celebrate Georgian Orthodox holidays here-- sometimes with the reluctance of people who are only converting for social purposes and sometimes with the fervor of those who are determined to reconnect with their "stolen" culture as deeply as possible.  Sometimes one attitude evolves into the other.  To my fascination, in the span of only two years I have watched the culture of my own house shift from the former attitude to the latter, although, admittedly, we are still not particularly fervent, just noticeably more so.  

When talking with my counterpart about the passing of our school math teacher, I asked her if he would be buried according to Muslim traditions or Christian traditions.  She told me that without doubt his burial would be done according to Muslim tradition.  Within the Georgian mountain understanding of Islam, this means a lot of things, but one major difference is that Muslim funerals are closed-casket.  Georgian wakes are open-casket.

Certainly you can see where I'm going with this now, but I have even another detail to add.  As I went to the wake yesterday as well, I can tell you that yesterday the casket was closed.  Today it was open.  

And although this may sound like it has devolved into a cold, clinical dissection of the anthropological history that surrounds me, let me assure you that that is not the case.  I am incapable of being so absorbed in these mountains and not feeling tied to the lives around me.  I am constantly seeking similarities between my life and theirs because I am convinced that the more parallels I can find, the more I will feel like I belong.  I want to feel like I belong. 

I can’t say that I was magically cured of my frustrations and loneliness by meditating on the confusion of funeral practices in Georgia and how they relate to my own perspective, but in dealing with my own despair at being the only one in my little world who doesn't instinctively understand the culture that I have so long been immersed in, the understanding that nobody around me is instinctively sure either calms me.

Rest in peace, Enveri Mas, you will be greatly missed.

What Do Chickens Follow?

Chickens follow spit.

At least, that's why my grandma tells me.  That's what her mother told her.  And if Grammy says it, well, it must be true.  Apparently, according to my grandmother, my great-grandmother once caught a chicken by going outside and spitting methodically closer and closer to her house.  She spit a trail right into the hall, then the living room, then the bathroom, then BAM!  She slammed the door!  Dinner's here, kids!

I have tested this theory by spitting out my bedroom window after brushing my teeth in the morning, and, dude!  It's true!  The chickens totally come running across the yard to check out my spit!  They must not like mint flavor, though, because they always seem disappointed when they get there.

Note to self:  Buy corn-flavored toothpaste.

Anyhow.  This occurred to me today as I was walking down a sidewalk in Batumi.  There I was, minding my own business, when my easy stroll became the site of a struggle for the ages.   

Squak!

Above my head was a chicken hanging by one leg from a second story apartment balcony.  Two Georgian ladies were trying to conceal their peals of laughter as one lady was on her hands and knees holding on to the last leg of a chicken who clearly did not want to be named Lunch.

Unfortunately for Lunch, it was not her lucky day.  I don't know her fate after she was retrieved from her epic jump, but I like to think that perhaps she is an excellent egg layer and she will be spared another day to hatch an even better plot to escape.  Pun intended.

Really, though, I think somebody must have spit on the sidewalk below.

Lunch wanted lunch!

Part II: The Fate of Ratsaurus, The Beginning of the End

*** A note to the reader:  If you have not read the first part of this story, scroll down two posts to the post titled, "Jim".  This is not the Star Wars Trilogy and you will gain nothing from of reading this story out of order.


It's been hard to sleep since Jim's been gone.  There's something about sleeping alone in a cold bedroom that gets to you after a while, and while I can't exactly say I miss him, more than one night lately has found me suspiciously eyeing the chewed-up corners of my top blanket.  I wonder where he is, I wonder if he is warm.  I wonder if he is dead.  God, I hope he's dead.

I mean.  Um.

Sure, we spent an unforgettable night together.  Sure, his existence brought me even closer to my own understanding of reasons I would be willing to die a painful disease-ridden death in a third world country.  Forged bonds like that are not to be forsaken lightly.  I mean, having another living being poop under your bed and chew on your underwear is about as memorable as it comes.  

Yeah.  I hope he's really, really good and dead.

But what of his compatriot?  What of Ratbominable?  Where did he go the night after he single-handedly consumed fifteen generously proportioned zombies before being so rudely interrupted by the awakening of my host family?  Well.  Sit criss-cross applesauce, my dears, while I spin y'all a village yarn ...

It was a few weeks ago now, by the dim ochre light of the harvest moon (that's right, it rose in January just for us), that I first grew aware of that little eater of the undead's presence in my own bedroom.  I was on my computer doing Really Important Things like playing spider solitaire and reading Yahoo! Answers for "Can my flesh-eating fungus cure cancer?" when I heard The Scuffle.  Don't know what a rat scuffle sounds like?  Live my life and you will begin naming rats by their scuffle sounds.

Mr. Shuffle-Paws
Mr. Squeaky Argument
Evil Tap Dance
Maradona
Aw, It's a Little Tiny Mousie
The Attic Birjha Boys

And those are just the first uncles on Squeaky Toes' mother's side.

I tried to convince myself that it was coming from the ceiling.  I do that a lot.  Try to redirect the origin of rodent sounds with my psychic powers.  But although I was wholeheartedly rooting for the relatively safe location of directly above my head, alas, it was not to be.  I had a visitor.

Scuffle, scuffle, bump.  Shuffle, sidle-waltz, squeak.  I'm pretty sure the soundtrack of my bedroom visitor's Unknown Location Symphony played backwards while watching The Wizard of Oz would be terrifying high (On life, guys, ok?  On life.  Relax).

I slid my laptop off of my stomach and padded silently towards my door to get my host mom.  I locked It inside.  Because if I was going to start a bedroom rendition of 28 Days Later, I didn't want to scare away my brains-munching co-star.

My conversation about the rodent with my family went, as so many of them do, in a relatively productive direction if you aren't a stickler for semantics:

Me: "I have a rat in my room."

Host Mom: "Really?  You have a mouse?"

Me: "Yes, I have a rat."  (I have learned, in Georgia, to answer "yes" regardless of whether something is true if I think it will get me what I want.  Oh, language, you tricky minx.)

Host Aunt: "What's wrong with Ala?"

Host Mom: "She has a mouse in her room."

Me: "Yes.  I have a R.A.T."


Act II: Scene I

Host Mother and Awkward Volunteer enter stage left through a bedroom door with no handle.  The room is in extreme disarray.  Everything is piled on the bed and looks about to topple off as if Awkward Volunteer had not made such a casual, sly exit as she clearly had wished to portray.  Both are both bundled up quite tightly as if it is very cold and while on Host Mom this looks rather normal, it makes Awkward Volunteer look distinctly homeless.


Host Mom: Taking in the scene.  "Are you sure you heard the mouse in your room?"

A.V.: "Yes.  There is a rat in here."

Host Mom: "Okay, where did you hear it?"

A.V.: "In the corner inside the wardrobe."

Host mom looks towards wardrobe.  It is closed and a chair is pushed in front of it.  The chair is piled high with books and other heavy objects as if Awkward Volunteer is attempting to cage a small bear.

Host Mom: "Ooooooookaaaaaaay.  Well, let's take a look, then."

Awkward Volunteer makes a show of being brave by walking forward one step for every two she takes back.  She appears to be performing some kind of African moon dance.  Host Mom ransacks wardrobe as A.V. pretends to help.

Host Mom:  "There's nothing in here.  I don't see the mouse.  Are you sure you heard it?"

A.V.:  "There is a RAT IN THIS ROOM."

Host Mom: "Well, it's not underneath the wardrobe ... and it can't get behind it ..."

Host Aunt enters stage left.

Host Aunt: "Are you sure you didn't hear that noise?"  Host Aunt points to the wood burning stove crackling across the hall.  Awkward Volunteer's pride is clearly wounded and she appears to be growing quite defensive.

A.V.:  "No.  I heard a  rat. in. this. room."

Host Mom:  "There is no mouse in this wardrobe."  She shakes all of A.V.'s clothes to make her point.  She looks ready to leave, but, sensing A.V. is rather unusually unhappy, she decides to sit on the bed instead.

Host Mom:  "Shhhhhhhhhhhh ..."  She waits.  And waits.  And waits.  As the silence continues, A.V. looks increasingly frustrated like one of those people whose dog won't do a trick in front of strangers.

Host Mom: Consolingly "If you hear it again, let me know, okay?"

Host Mom exits stage left.  A.V. shifts from foot to foot, then begins to unload all objects from her bed and dump them on the floor in a heap.  She appears quite used to cleaning with this method.  A.V. eases herself onto her unstable cot, grabs her computer, and begins to search Yahoo! Answers again.

A few minutes pass.  Suddenly A.V. starts, then stills.  She clearly hears something coming from the same corner of her room ...

To Be Continued ...

What it's about

So I guess it's up to everyone to figure out what they're going to get out of their Peace Corps service and it's hardly a thing that is a written law anywhere, you know?  Sometimes I think about what I was expecting to find out here and my first, most honest thought, was adventure.  Of course, I was in middle school then and perhaps I had more complex, serious reasons at the time that I can no longer remember, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.  Adventure.  This idea of adventure grew slowly into a desire for understanding.  I wanted to understand another culture and another lifestyle so completely different from my own that it would be impossible to achieve by simply entering the corporate world and requesting a move to a foreign hotspot.  I wanted to see behind the curtain of  the life that I was born into.  This is the most honest, driving desire that I had for joining Peace Corps.  Curiosity and determination.

I never joined Peace Corps to save the world.

Honestly, I didn't join to work at all.  Don't take that the wrong way, I certainly always intended to do the job I had promised to do, but it was a sideline to my genuine intent.

I don't know what I thought about making bonds with the people in the country I moved to.  I can't claim to have thought about it much beyond the idea of an African hut and a moonlit ritual dance.  Or whatever.  That thing that all of us think.  Lots of curiosity and misguided imagination ... and a lack of imagination in the area of human bonds-- the place where imagination is almost always the most worth having.

A lot of volunteers comment on how difficult it is to blog while you're here.  It's not for a lack of time.  It's not for a lack of available paper and pens, or, for that matter, computers in this age.  Our families ask for updates and emails and it's the strangest sensation to desire to explain and then to be stopped by the force of your own experience.  Certainly, a lack of description in this case isn't for a lack of things to describe.

Peace Corps encourages us to take the time to reflect.  We get weekly emails that invariably contain this reminder somehow.  They send us quotes, tell us stories, make contests for our blogs, and make it an actual part of our biannual paperwork.

Are you telling your family?

Are you telling your friends?

Does everyone at home know that secret corner of Georgia like you do?  Are you telling them?

Although it's certainly not a bad idea to encourage this (it's a great idea), it seems a little unfair.  Certainly volunteers twenty years ago out on an island who were alone for months on end were not required to give constant updates on the alien world that they inhabited, nor understand and express clearly their personal growth and emotional change on a day-to-day basis.  I think it's a great idea to try, but don't blame us if we struggle in silence.

It's kind of like this.  Imagine that you've lived your whole life the way that you understand it now, and then, one day, you begin to wade into very dirty, murky lake.  At the beginning, you can swish your feet around and see them as the mud swirls around them.  You wade a little deeper and you can't see them anymore, but you just saw them a minute ago so that isn't really a big deal.  Then, you keep going deeper.  You can't see your legs now, or your torso, either.  You're not sure what you're doing anymore, but you keep walking in.  It seems like you've been doing this for a long time, but honestly, it's hard for you to say.  You wade a little deeper and begin to submerge your collarbone when somebody from America calls or you get a peppy email from Peace Corps asking you to describe in detail the effect of the lake on your feet.  At this point, you could have flippers and you wouldn't even know it.  "Wait!" you cry.  "Hold on, I'm just not sure anymore!"  "What's the big deal?" they ask.  "Just look down."

One thing Peace Corps is beginning to show me me is that you often don't know how something has changed you until strange, late moments.  Until a thought you have months after an event strikes you and you take the time to track it back to the experience that founded it.  Until you suddenly realize that in this landscape of difference, you are no longer constant yourself anymore.

They ask you that question, you know.  When they interview you.  In a little office in LA, a little man asked me how I planned on coping with being in a completely different culture.  How exactly, he asked, did I view my personal identity?

I told him that I had been through it before in Argentina.  That immersion in different cultures forces you to consider what makes you different.  That you come up with a core understanding of yourself, of your values and your likes and dislikes and that you take that as who you are.  This is too bald of an explanation, forgive me that.

And it's true, what I said, and that dude probably heard some variation of that day in and day out at that job.  He told me about building a computer lab in Moldova and I privately wrinkled my nose (no African moon dance?), although now I can appreciate what an accomplishment that really was.  I can also appreciate that it didn't invalidate his experience in the slightest.  Turns out it isn't all about those moonlit dances after all.

I think it's about not knowing what the hell it's about.

But I don't really know.

Jim

So my mother has been on my case about this blog and all (Hi Mom!) ... and I guess, according to her, the New Year deserves a post or two.  Personally, I wasn't so sure.  2014 had to prove herself worthy of my energy first.  You know, it's awfully hard to rouse myself from doing nothing but stare at the snow outside my window.  I feel like I could write a whole chapter on January so far and title it, "In Which I Shift My Butt".

Anyhow.  The story I bring to you today is one that I have told a few of you with certainly more humor and flair than I was feeling at the time.  This is the story of The Rat, who, for the purposes of my US government monitored blog, we will refer to as Jim, although I won't pretend that I don't have a more private name for him.

Three days ago, I was awakened from a dead sleep when a rat ran across my leg in the middle of the night.  I freaked out so bad I think that my body actually momentarily levitated from my bed before I kicked my leg as hard as I could and sent the rat flying across the room.  Panicked, I sat up, teeth chattering, and pawed frantically along my window ledge for my PC-issued cell phone and flashlight.  By then, Jim had sequestered himself neatly somewhere in my bedroom, God Knows Where.  I tucked myself under my covers again, staring at the eerie vision of my bedroom by flashlight.  Now what?

I can't promise this to be exactly true, but I'm pretty sure it was at least a million hours before I drifted to sleep again, having nightmare after nightmare about rats.  I remember one in particular where I was sure that I was awake, but unable to move as rats came closer and closer and closer.  I was then jerked into real reality by an enormous crash which was Jim knocking large things off of my bedroom shelves as he attempted his own personal scale of Everest.  I am sorry to say that this story does not end with him buried in an avalanche as that certainly would have made me happy at the time.

Panic.  Flashlight.  Nothing.  Jim's gone again.  And I'm awake.  [CENSORED].  Now, in the silent wake of Jim's clatter, I hear a second noise.  Outside of my room, there is a second rat.  There is a loud second rat.  In fact, I can hear it gnashing away at something, and, gauging from the level of noise, I judge this rat to be roughly the size of a rabid wolf.  It's so loud, in fact, that it wakes my host aunt and uncle up and I can hear them opening their bedroom door across from mine and discussing in hushed voices what to do.  They wake my host nephew.  All three of them stand in the hall outside of my bedroom as if they have any hope at all of finding Ratsaurus on the completely unheated second story of our house at 4:00 am in the morning.

I lie silent in bed.  I have four options:
a.  Do nothing.  Sleep with Jim for the rest of the night.  Pray not to die of Hantavirus.
b.  Alert my host family that I've got a rat too.  Invite a 4:00 am forensic exploration of my bedroom.  Pray host uncle does not find feminine products.
c.  Wait until host family goes to bed, then attempt to go sleep downstairs, which is also unheated.  Most certainly die of exposure in transit.
d.  Open my bedroom door and hope Jim leaves.  Offer up firstborn child to God to gain assurance that this act will not simply invite Ratzilla in.

In an obscure throwback to Pokémon and the 90's, I choose Hantavirus.  I've read that it has a 1 to 5 week incubation period, which is significantly longer than I would live in any of the other situations.  (Dear Peace Corps: I'M KIDDING).  Dear family: But really ...

The next morning, I stagger down to the kitchen to tell my host mom all about Jim.  Her solution?  We wait until the sun comes up over the mountain high enough so that the house warms up a little (this is about 2:30 pm), we open my East-facing bedroom window, and we place a rat trap on the floor.  Then we lock my bedroom door with Jim inside for hours so that he DIES.

We attempt this, but no Jim.  His location became a mystery until this morning.

This morning I awoke to World War III: Rat Edition as my host mom and my host aunt ripped the entire upstairs apart.  Apparently Jim had managed to keep my aunt up all night this time and she was less than pleased.  To hear her gleefully tell the story, my host uncle is terrified of rats and actually made her get up first this morning to bang on every item in the room and declare the space "all clear" before he would agree to get out of bed.  But, that's beside my point.  I listened to the chorus of screams and bangs and horrified cries of "I SAW IT!  AHHHHHH I SAW IT!" for a solid twenty minutes until they apparently managed to drive Jim out into the cold of our balcony.

And that, my friends, is the heartwrenching story of Jim: A cold, lonely plague rat looking for love.  If you are finishing this story with an uneasy sense of closure, if you are pondering about the whereabouts and home base of The Ratinator Largest Unseen Rat Known To Man And Loudest Eater Ever, let me tell you ... so am I.  SO AM I.