What is that on the freaking roof?

5 February 2009


I figured I’d take a moment to describe an, if anything, interesting situation going on above my head.

I couldn’t help but notice one night, while I was lying in bed, a strange scratching/crawling noise coming from just above my room. Being the new guy in town in his first month, I was somewhat baffled and taken aback by such a noise, but it was clear the sound was being made by an animal of some sort. Now, if it had simply been a squirrel (Wait. Are there squirrels here? Heck, I don’t know.) racing across the roof real quick, I wouldn’t’ve bothered, but this critter, whatever it was, was aggressively making love to my roof, scratching away at it like it had something it really wanted. After about a minute and a half of this annoying raucous, I gathered all the wit I could muster, put together the pieces of the plan only a highly sophisticated Peace Corps volunteer could make, and came to a triumphant conclusion: I’ll hit the ceiling with something.

So, dim-eyed and cranky, I looked all over my room for something, anything to startle the little varmint off my roof. I looked at the peç, and, low and behold, the long pincher thing used to pick up logs caught my eye. I grabbed it, pointed it upwards, and knocked the roof silly with it. As you could expect, the rodent, frightened, changed positions to another part of the roof, where I only followed it to slam it out of its wits again…and again and again, until it was out of range of my precious ears. I then washed the black nastiness off my hands and rested in peace.
And the battle has continued.

Nope, wish I could say it was a one-time thing, but contrary to what could’ve ended with a funny little anecdote has developed into a tale of war. In fact, as I type at this very moment, the critter is continuing to scurry across my roof, doing, well, whatever it’s doing (Aybəniz, my host mother, says it has to do with gathering and eating nuts or something. Why it would do that at 11:22 at night is beyond me.), regardless of what I’d prefer.
Oh, well. I’ll do what I can, and, heck, it gives me a reason to be as tired as possible when I hit the sack at night, in hopes that no creature, whatever it is and whatever it’s doing, will disturb my slumber.

Now, I have two questions for all of you:
1.What do you think it is?
2. What should I do?