Of Mice and Rats

As some of you may remember, I had a memorable rat/mouse incident last year, and to really come full circle, I want to share a few tales of my dealings with the rodents of Tonga in 2010.

Right before my parents arrived I noticed I was, once again, being invaded by rodents. I tried the usual remedies: keeping all food in the refrigerator, which just made my bread cold, and bringing over my neighbor’s cat, which simply resulted in cat poop in my house and two very long nights of Mui Mui and the cat crying and fighting. Sarah was in Tonga, so, unable to come up with another solution, I asked her to pick up some rat poison for me. She kindly did, and I set the blocks of rodent death up in my ceiling where the rats had taken up residence.

After a few days, I started to see results. First, the mouse droppings disappeared. Then, when I woke up one morning I was met with a giant dead rat on my bathroom floor. I screamed, called Lupe over, and we measured: 12 inches…ugh. We then both decided we did not want to touch it, so called for a high school boy who lives nearby to come and dispose of the rat. Fotu thought it was awesome and Tupou kept sympathizing with the dead rat and telling me how faka’ofa it was.

A couple of days later, there were no visible signs of rodent life: victory was at hand! However, that’s when I started to smell something. The first day it was faint, and I couldn’t quite place it. The following day, Lupe came over and, using our olfactory powers, we determined there was something very dead in my ceiling. Now, my ceiling is essentially plywood boards nailed over rafters, which makes it impossible to see up into it unless you take the boards down. Le’o was called over and told to bring a hammer, and Fotu and Tupou accompanied him. The five of us sniffed around my house and concluded the smell was coming from above the bathroom, the smallest room by far. We pulled down some of the boards, brought a chair over from the school, and using a mirror and flashlight tried to look inside, but it was dark, and we couldn’t maneuver around the toilet and get high enough up into the ceiling to find anything. Finally, Le’o decided that the only way to find the rat was to pick me up and have me sit on his shoulders to I could get up into the ceiling with the mirror and flashlight. I’m realizing now, while typing this that this story isn’t going to sounds as ridiculous as it actually was, but bear with me. Now, in Tonga, men, especially married men, do not really associate at all with single women, never mind touch them. For example, when Le’o and I walk somewhere together, we walk on completely opposite sides of the road. So the fact that he was picking me up was mortifying enough. Add to that looking for a dead rat with a mirror and flashlight in the ceiling of a small bathroom, and you may be able to get an idea of how absurd the situation was. After a while we still hadn’t found anything, and were about to give up, when Fotu found the dead rat: outside in the opening of the pipe that serves as my shower drain. The pipe had been conducting the decaying rat inside and up into the bathroom. I’ve never seem Le’o so embarrassed, or red, and after that, he didn’t even talk to me for almost a week! (Not in a mean way, just in a very Tongan and embarrassed way.)

My second (and hopefully last) rodent tale happened when my parents were here. Tim had gone for one of his early morning length-of-the-island walks, and Robin and I were making breakfast when I saw a mouse. I managed to trap it under a bowl in the bathroom but since neither of us wanted to kill it, I went over to the school and asked some of the boys to come and dispose of it. Well, this was too exciting an offer to pass up, and within minutes, all of the class 6 boys were sprinting toward my house, armed with sticks and rocks and wearing boxes and empty milk cartons on their heads; they had been playing solider. They burst in and immediately accidently set the mouse free and then spent the better part of a half an hour chasing it around my house, all of them screaming and laughing and giving detailed battle instructions. Fotu, of course, followed them- who’d want to miss out on this excitement!?- and was very helpful in shouting out exactly what everyone should be doing and when. Finally, after tearing apart the kitchen, they recaptured the poor mouse, and, holding it by the tail, marched out victoriously.

With any luck, I’ll make it through the next few weeks without any more serious rodent encounters, but, all in all, despite the damage they’ve caused mice and rats and the world’s dumbest cat have made for some pretty entertaining tales over the last two years.