Post traumatic stress from bed bugs

I want to share with you a fun (super not fun) game I've been playing every night before bed for the last month or so. Did I already mention it's fun (super not fun)?! No, it's not a ~fun game~ to play with your lover before bed... unless of course, your lover is a bed bug. Or perhaps, a hundred bed bugs. Or hopefully, as you'd never imagined this is what you'd hope for in a lover, they are simply a speck or sand or a small critter that closely resembles a bed bug -- maybe a tiny dead ant -- but it is impossible to tell with the naked eye but it is DEFINITELY NOT (but maybe is?) a bed bug.

Here's how you play:

Get all ready for bed. Brush your teeth. Shower. Get into your sleeping clothes. Turn on the 2 fans that you use to make your room a refreshing (still hot as blazes) 75 degrees instead of 80. Then crawl into bed. Depending on the temperature of your room, you can drape your sheet over your body and imagine what it felt like, seemingly so long ago, when you wrapped yourself in warm flannel sheets and a down comforter while a soft blanket of snow covered the ground outside. The times when it was so cold that you had to wear something other than underwear and a baggy t-shirt to bed and when you didn't dare walk around without those stretchy cloth tubes around your feet. What are those things called again? Oh right, socks. A pool of sweat builds in the little luge that leads your nose to your upper lip, and you snap out of that image of you in your previous life.

As you lay still in bed, your multiple bug bites start to make their appearances known to you. Certainly, they are just mosquito bites (unless of course, they're bed bug bites), since they don't follow any if the usual bed bug bite symptoms which are a few little bits in a line. Breakfast, lunch, then dinner. But hey, you might as well check your bed (for the 27th night in a row) to see if any bed bugs survived the insane boiling water and bleaching and spraying rampage you and your roommate went on a month ago.

You turn on the flashlight app on your handphone (cell phone, but Malaysia style) and resume game position: you are crouched on your hands and knees on your mattress with your head only inches above the bed sheet. You inspect the entire surface area of the mattress by shining your light on any speck of dust or lint or sand or dead bug (or possibly live bed bug?!?!?) to determine its identity. Most of the suspects are little balls of lint or the wings of bugs that must have been squished by you in your sleep or suffered some other trauma that left one of their wings on your sheets. You are thankful for those bug wings and lint balls, for they are not bed bugs, and therefore their presence is almost welcomed into your bed. The other things, the little things that you really can't tell if they're just a speck of sand or if they're a bed bug are what really freak you out and as a precautionary measure, you crush the unknowns under your razer sharp (actually pretty dull) fingernails.

But alas, it is way past your bed time, so you decide to call it a night and simply conduct an experiment since you studied science at that's your specialty, obviously. You brush off all the little linties and wingies and the probably not (but maybe?) bed bugs and decide you'll go to sleep with zero specks of anything on your sheets and then when you wake up (assuming you ever fall asleep after traumatizing yourself) you will reassess the situation. You should congratulate yourself, for future graduate school advisors are lining up to offer you research assistantships at their highly ranked institutions because of this revolutionary bed bug experiment in which you have sacrificed yourself as a test subject (awful design, no one wants you to do this in grad school).

Now you allow yourself to think those terribly tempting thoughts about socks and snow on the windowsill and flannel sheets and being the slightest bit cold for once because you deserve to dream about something other than the paranoia of the return of the bed bugs. You are about to fall asleep, but suddenly you have to itch your head. Lice?!?!?!

(No, I don't actually have lice).

This blog, "Uprooted", is not an official Fulbright Program site. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations. 

Surf's up

The last month was one of the hardest months of my life. A wave of negativity hit me as I experienced my first bout of cultural fatigue in Malaysia, which is more or less defined as “the physical and emotional exhaustion that almost invariably results from the infinite series of minute adjustments required for long-term survival in an alien culture". The daily choice between rice or noodles for almost every meal left me struggling to find foods that provide my body with the nutrition I need to stay healthy. I was continuously stared and pointed at, being one of the only orang putih to have ever resided in this town. The feeling of being constantly being watched while outside of my house bothered me more than I like to admit, since I know that everyone is just genuinely curious about the tall white blonde lady who just showed up. I also struggled to define, let go of, and maintain relationships – an emotional battle I was not ready for. To make everything a little bit more stressful, we discovered a large community of bedbugs that my roommate had been sharing her bed with. Thus ensued a life consuming two week battle against the bedbugs and a landlord who thought the pests were only a “small matter” that people tolerated in Malaysia.

While I write this in past tense, I still struggle with each of these issues. Being an outsider continuously tests me and I often times feel alone and stuck in a world where I don’t belong. Thank God that the bedbugs are gone, but every tiny black bug I see now freaks me out and I have had nightmares of them invading our house.

The tides are turning, though, and that wave of negativity is flowing into something much more positive. Post bedbugs, I finally have time to attend Zumba classes again. I am bonding with my students, and the boarding students have started to call me kakak, which means sister. And best of all: TODAY I GOT A BIKE!! Since my roommate and I share a car between the two of us, and she needs it to drive to school whereas I live within walking distance from my campus, I have often felt stuck at home despite our best efforts to make car sharing work. Having a bike is freeing, both physically and mentally. 

Tonight, I went on a bike ride through an old Malay (Malaysian Muslim) neighborhood. Five minutes into my ride, I had been greeted by dozens of families who were sitting on their porches enjoying the sunset. Then, I heard my name being yelled and turned to see a woman, “Aunty”, who works at my school on the janitorial team. She called me onto her porch and insisted I sit with her family while she brought me a cold drink. Finally, she allowed me to continue on my way, but only after inviting my family to her house for the Muslim holiday of Hari Raya, and giving me a bag full of snacks in case I got hungry on my ride.

I continued pedaling towards town, and upon reaching the riverfront I joined the crowds of people who waited riverside for the benak. The benak is the tidal bore that happens twice a day when the ocean tides change, resulting in a change in direction of the river flow. Depending on the magnitude of the tide, the benak wave can range in size from a few tiny ripples in the water to a substantial wave that locals surf on. Tonight happened to be fairly large wave, and I watched with amazement as it came barreling down the river and half a dozen surfers paddled like mad to catch it. As soon as the singular wave reached the bend in the river, it broke, creating more waves that rippled out and hit the shore, splashing the observers on the peer. Most of the locals left after the wave broke, but I stuck around to watch the surfers paddle to shore. I struck up a conversation with another woman who was also waiting around. After some conversation in broken Malay and broken English, I learned that she, too, is a surfer but had decided not to surf tonight. She and the other surfers invited me to join her tomorrow morning to surf the benak!

I can feel the tides changing. I'm getting out of this bummer of a slump and I'm ready to ride the cultural and literal waves. At this point I'm realizing that I'd better focus on the positives rather drown myself in the overwhelming challenges the come with living abroad. We'll see how that goes. Surf's up, dudes.

This blog, "Uprooted", is not an official Fulbright Program site. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.