A Reunion, a Foot Bath & Lots of Hippos

“YOU OWE ME WESLEY!!” I yelled into the phone over the typically expected noises that emanate from a Burkinabe bush taxi, you know the ones by now; the screaming babies, the screaming goats, the screaming music, the screaming shriek of the bus' interior frame about to collapse from the abusive roads, the man screaming into his phone next to you who thinks this is the perfect time to have a friendly conversation with his brother twice-removed on his father's uncle's side. Yeah, I was on my THIRD of these deluxe bush taxis on my way to see one of my best friends, Wes, in his village of Lanfiera (in the Northwest of Burkina) for the weekend. After FIVE of these and about 14 hours later, I made it to his village, in one piece but in desperate need of some R&R, which Wes marvelously provided with a foot-soak bucket bath and a lukewarm beer.

Lanfiera is a smaller village than mine (Bagassi) and is predominantly Muslim. Wes had told me numerous times about the friendly neighborhood Mosque that had its microphones directly pointing towards his house but I never understood until I was woken up at 4am every morning with the screamo-styled chanting into these said microphones and then the free-for-all kids' karaoke time that came afterwards. That day, we worked at the Bisongo where Wes volunteers (pre-school) and spent the day doing a review of the shapes, colors and numbers they learnt that week. I taught them how to play “Red Light, Green Light” and they loved it. The Bisongo has about 15 kids from the ages of 2-5 and is funded by the community itself (even though apparently not many people know that it exists!). The volunteers that Wes replaced had built, painted, furnished and stocked the Bisongo the year before and Wes' job for his service is to help with teaching methods and techniques at the administration level and help teach the pre-school teachers hands-on classroom management.

After the day of work, I got the grand tour of Lanfiera and went on an epic adventure to the river! After biking about 2km, we got to the river gardens which was growing a variety of plants and fruit trees and grass. We parked the bikes and walked about another ½ Km to the actual water (its dry season so the water had receded drastically) where we asked a local man to take us out on his canoe, he refused saying that he was done fishing for the day (putting nets out) so we kept walking. Finally I saw another man coming in so I made my way over while Wes and his site-mate (another volunteer who lives there) walked to the other bank to find hippo prints. This man didn't speak a lick of French so I have no idea how, but completely in Dioula, I managed to get the guy to take us out on his dugout canoe to go see the supposed hippos that were in the river (super proud moment y'all!).

The water was giving off an air of humid heat and the sun was setting like it always does here, in a huge ball of fiery orange. Adema had us sit in his canoe and he pushed us out with a large bamboo stick/tree until we got to where the hippos were supposed to be. We heard them before we saw them...the noise brought goosebumps to my skin and shivers down my back:

“MAARRGHHHHH” went the hippo, “GAAHH!!” went we.

After hearing the deep, vibrating, angry sounding roar of the giant bull hippos, Adema still continued paddling towards them until we could get a clear view:

“GAAAH!” we yelled again, “Akine Adema, Akine!!!”

(In Dioula, 'its good, its good', meaning for him to stop).

I gave him the thumbs up and told him that it was beautiful, he gave me a quizzical look, clucked disapprovingly from his lips (very typical Burkinabe thing) and shook his head and said what I thought was:

“No good, hippos no good, hippos eat people!”

I almost tipped the canoe. **

After we got our fill of hippo watching and got back onto safe ground, we thanked Adema profusely and went to find our bikes (at this point it was almost completely dark and we hadn't thought to bring a light) and I thought my adventures for the day were done. I was wrong. I guess I have a sort of attraction for bats because I can never seem to get away from the furry little things. I was just walking between Wes and his site-mate, chatting away excitedly about what a beautiful and raw experience we just had and BAM!! out of nowhere, an obviously disoriented bat smacked me square in the back! I had no idea what it was until I looked back and saw the poor thing flying away all wobbly and confused. Guess Burkina was giving me a reminder to never let myself think I'm safe from the flying rats!

After I recovered, we continued to a great little shack place that had fresh fish from the river and we picked through 3 whole fishes (heads and all) topped with cucumbers, onions and tomatoes (most protein I've had in a while!).

So, to sum it all up, everything is still going great here in Burkina and in even better news, I didn't become hippo poop this weekend!

Let the adventures continue!

**Don't worry, what he actually meant was that hippos just maul people, not eat them.

What Peace Corps Volunteers really do...

Adama, our Hippo Hunter

Those specks are Hippos!

Fresh catch of the day 

Wes' Preschoolers

First Encounter with a Real-life Green Monster

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my host family's house in my village playing cards with one of my brothers when out of nowhere, my little sisters starts screaming in fear and running toward the house. We all looked around panicking, had a scorpion stung her? Did a rabid dog bite her? We had no idea what had sent my 6 year old sister fleeing to hide in the house. My brother saw it before I did.

Looking past the top of my head, he calmly got up and said “Zazie, you should go inside.” Confused and slightly terrified at what I might find behind me, I slowly turned my head and immediately I knocked the chair down with how quickly I stood up.

A dark green monster made of leaves was running full force towards us in huge strides, waving an enormous branch in his hand, with an obviously clear intent to smack whatever and whomever would get in its way, with 6 younger boys chasing after it yelling incomprehensibly and waving around branches of their own.

My brain literally had no idea what I was seeing and I did the only sensible thing I could think of at the time and I sat back down. My brother just looked at me exasperatedly and stepped in front of me. The leafy green monster finally stopped running maybe 2 feet in front of where we were, me in my chair not knowing what else to do and my brother, being the protector that he is, standing bravely in front of me. The leafy monster did not speak a word, he peeked over my brother's shoulder at me, looked back at my brother, shook his entire leafy body so hard that leaves were flying out of everywhere off his body, raised his branch to my brother's face (my brother did not flinch at all), looked at me again and stomped off.

As soon as the green monster saw some other innocent villagers walking on the road next to our house, he immediately started running towards them and shaking his branch the whole way there. These people ran screaming into the nearest house.

Meanwhile, as I sat there trying to comprehend what the heck had just happened, my brother calmly sat back down and picked up his cards we had knocked off the yellow water bidon we had been playing on, and started laughing. “The mask was scared of you! Did you see it stop in its tracks? Heehee...mask was not smacking anyone in our house today!” He was clutching at his sides.

I still had not found the words so I just stared at him for a few seconds and finally shouted, “What the hell is THE MASK?!”.

A little history lesson:

The Bwa, or Bwaba, (the ethnic group in my village, they speak Bwamu) believe that the world was created by a God, Dobweni, who abandoned man and left the earth when he was wounded by a woman pounding millet with her pestle. To act as his representative among man and as an intermediary between man and the forces of nature, Dobweni sent his son, Do.

Do represents the bush and its life-giving force, for the Bwa still depend on the bush for game and gathered food. He shows himself as the source of plant life and the power that gives fruit to man's work in the fields. Do is concerned with all ceremonies that insure the renewal of life.

One representation of Do is with masks, bieni, made exclusively of wild plants (stalks, grass, and leaves), because they must not resemble the creations of man.

The most typical leaf mask is a mask that appears at the beginning of the performance season to sweep all impurities from the community. Leaf masks representing the initial and universal form of Dwo serve to integrate the individual into human society and to link the community of man with the natural world.

Leaf masks are born in the bush, early in the morning, when young initiates of the congregation gather vines and the leaves of the karite tree, a symbol of fertility. The mask assistants (these are the young boys that were accompanying my lovely green monster), who do not perform, wrap the body of the performer in vines from head to toe. The performer may no longer speak because speech is a human skill.

The major contexts in which leaf masks appear are initiations and village purification or renewal ceremonies called loponu.The performer becomes Do, and performs in rites that represent the dependence of man on the forces of nature for life.

* My family also mentioned that this green monster went around the village smacking anyone who crossed their paths with his branch as part of this purification, hence why my little sister and the others ran terrified into the house.

This is the traditional leaf masks that you see, the one I saw was the exact same but missing the white feathers on his head.

This information and these pictures were taken from the University of Iowa Museum of Art's website from a thorough study done by CHRISTOPHER D. ROY: http://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/topic-essays/show/39?start=8

Classroom

     Having 200 students (98 in one and 102 in the other) has, so far, been a thrilling ride made up of equal parts of downright terror and incomprehensible hilarity. The first time I walked into my classroom, I felt a desire to A) run away B) throw up a little C) cry. The sheer number of students is so immense that it literally takes your breathe away and its no wonder that so many students fail or redouble classes...as a teacher you literally have ZERO time to give individual attention to all the students, you can pick a good chunk of kids from each class to spend more time with but its difficult to deal with the thought that some kids you just simply have to let fail. Its not right and its certainly not fair but teachers are far and few in between in most villages which results in bigger (huuuger) classroom sizes.

     Like any other classroom in the world, some students try really hard and others don't. Here are some of my favorite responses from a “get-to-know-the-students-better” questionnaire I gave my students the first week of class, some of them just grammatically hilarious and others terrifying:

How old are you?

I am fine, how are you?

What is your favorite subject?

My favorite is Ms. Zazie.

(Sawyer is too difficult for them to pronounce...and yes, I was tempted to give this kid points for sucking up)

What is your favorite animal?

My favorite animal is to eat the dog. (Kind of an error....Welcome to BF)

How many brothers and sisters do you have?

I have six fathers...one is donkey. (Uumm...)

What did you buy at the market?

I buy the childrens and a water. (Uummm again...)

What is the purpose and importance of the verb “To do”?

The “to do” verb is important because it is interesting.

     There are many times where my students will push my buttons but half of the time I can't help but cracking up at their attempts to speak broken English...the things they say sometimes, I swear...my stern demeanor is completely undermined all the time. I found that most students are so terrified of their teachers because lets face it, teachers here have a LOT on their plates with the number of students so classroom management is something they have no patience to work torwards with the students. Its either shut up, sit down, get out of the class, go home, you get -5 points, etc. Positive reenforcement is not really a thing here. I have had very little major classroom management problems and I solely attribute this to being scared of being mean and not being liked by my kids so I have come up with a few strategies to reward the well-behaved students rather than only punishing the few stragglers and I have found that the class time we have together has become pretty enjoyable and oftentimes fun! I allow the students some freedoms that they otherwise do not have in other classes...like cracking a harmless joke once in a while.

Some other interactions:

Me : How do you say 'pen' in the plural?

Student #46: Pennes

Me : Almost but nooooo...someone else?

Student #12: Penis?

Me : Uh...what?

Student #33: Madam, he said 'penis'...thats how you say it!

Me: Uh, no, no thats not correct. The correct answer is 'Pens'. You just add 's' to the end to make it plural. Okay, someone come write up on the board a sentence with the word 'pen' in the plural.

Students #87: comes to the board, writes – The penis is red.

Me: Whaaaat? No no no. Why is there 'is', its ---- ah nevermind. Do you guys even know what that means?

Class: No Ms. Zazie.

Me: Oh.....okay, well its not a word in English. Mooooooooving on.

Class: So its not 'penis' its 'pens', got it.

Me: *sigh

     I also allot a 15 minute ask-Ms.Zazie-how-to-say-anything-in-English break at the end of the week for the students to ask things that we may not cover in class but that they've heard in movies or songs, or simply things they want to learn to say. I have found that designating a topic for these sessions has been the best strategy to avoid the super awkward and inappropriate and sometimes vulgar (thank you Lil Wayne) questions. The first time I did this, the kids went crazy with the questions on American rap music (and keep in mind these are all asked in French and sometimes broken English):

     Ms. Zazie, what does “gun” mean? How do you get tattoos like Lil Wayne? Whats the word for “blood”? How do you say “Je veux t'embrasser?” (translation – how do you say “I want to kiss you?”) What is a “whore”? ......

     The list goes on and on. After I got massacred by questions I DID NOT want to answer, I decided that I would have to give the students boundaries for what they can and cannot ask me. The easiest way to do this was to give them a topic each time, innocent as possible. Like: sports, animals, family, life in America versus Burkina, countries, etc. This has helped minimize the damage!

     For a first time teacher, being thrown into such large class sizes has forced me to think on my feet and multitask like never before. Even with only 6 months of experience so far, I tell myself that if I can handle 100 students at once, piled on each other 4 to a desk and stepping over each other to get to the back at times, then I can handle anything Burkina Faso has to throw at me. Bring it on!

Holidays, Herds, Hakuna Matata

Hey there!

I know its been a while but things have been a little hectic the past few weeks. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year celebration! Kids in village here don't exactly get presents (small children love to go through trash to find the cans and wrappers and other knick-knacks to construct their dirt-castles and will go crazy for a tire to launch and chase down the road...for hours) so I decided to get my host family some small gifts and make the day fun for the kids. I planned out a scavenger hunt for my 3 host siblings (Koya 6, Moctar 17, Hamza 20) around the neighborhood to lead them to find their gifts and early on Christmas morning I sent the kids on their adventure. They had a blast running around (with Koya always running a solid 20 feet behind, trying to get her legs going fast enough to catch up to the boys all the while yelling “waaaaaaaiiiittttttt for meeeeeeee!!”) and went nuts for the water guns, remote controlled car and Barbie doll they found at the end of the hunt. 

My host parents were also very happy about the 25kg bag of rice I bought for the family (they feed me everynight and never accept for me to help them pay for food so this bag will feed them for months!). Of course I couldn't leave Captain out (my puppy) so I bought her some dried fish heads and she had a great time. Christmas lunch consisted of salad (its lettuce season, I am lucky enough to have it in my village, not all volunteers get lettuce!), pasta, rice, some sort of meat (you just don't want to ask) and watermelon, delicious!

A few days later I headed to Ouaga to meet some other volunteers to celebrate New Years Eve. We went to a dance club typical of Burkina with mirrors on every inch of the walls so that the dancers can watch themselves dancing (sometimes it gets really awkward and Burkinabe will dance with themselves in front of a mirror with nobody else around..they just love it!). The next morning (about 2 hours of sleep later) we got on public transport to the village of Pama, about 30km from the border of Benin. It took us about 8-9 hours of travel, half in a horrifyingly speedy charter bus and the other half in a deteriorated bush taxi where the seats in front of us fell onto our shins and forced 2 terrified Burkinabe girls into our laps.

We stayed in a “hostel” (in the Safari coordinator's house) and got picked up by the Safari truck at 5am. As we headed into the park we saw some lion tracks but never did end up finding them...but being charged by a herd of pissed-off elephants made up for that! We saw:

A ton of Elephants (veerrryyy up-close)

Hippos

Crocodiles

A bunch of different Antelope

1 Baboon

Warthogs (the group before us got to see a lion chasing one of these Pumbas down!)

Really cool, electric blue birds

I wish I could write more about what other things have been going on but I am currently battling for the limited internet access with the rest of the volunteers trying to contact family for the holidays. We had a great time bringing in the New Year & I hope everyone back home had safe holidays. :)

The elephants checking us out before they decided to charge!

The group in our Safari truck with the hunter (just in case something wants to hunt us)

Hippos!

Some of the animals at the park

Watching history being made...

Update on the political situation here in Burkina:

Let me start off by saying that I AM NOT IN DANGER. The political situation here has nothing to do with Westerners and they are not targeting us in any way, what is going on is between the Burkinabe and their government. Plus the Peace Corps is working closely with the American Embassy here to ensure all volunteers' safety before all.

So basically whats going on is that the current President, Blaise Compaoré, is trying to pass a referendum to the constitution to be able to lift the term limit on his presidency, which he has already successfully done before. He has been in power since led a coup d'état in 1987, and has been reelected president four times since 1991.

And a lot of people are pissed because they believe it is time for the President to step down, some have been going as far as to say that he has become a dictator. The opposition has called for protests and civil disobedience starting tomorrow (October 28^th). All schools and universities are closed for the entire week and government offices will be closed at least for tomorrow for the start of the protests. Over the weekend, some people here in the capital have begun their rioting and set tires are fire and blockaded roads and police have responded with tear gas, but nobody has been severely hurt.

We will see what happens from now until the elections next year! If the referendum passes then Compaoré will most likely win the election next year as well thus why the opposition is trying to stop this NOW. In any case, history for this country is being made this week and I am happy to be here to witness it. 

Full article with more detail:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/23/us-burkina-politics-idUSKCN0IC11120141023

President Blaise Compaoré

A little less wise...

     So the past few weeks have been a combination of a great, seaside vacation and a very painful experience. Just 2 days before the official start of classes in Burkina, the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) called and said that a Medevac (medical evacuation) was approved to remove my severely impacted wisdom tooth (see picture below). I was headed to Dakar, bustling capital city of Senegal! I immediately made arrangements for my new puppy, Captain (also see picture below), with my neighbors (they are convinced he is an angel sent by my deceased kitten, Pirate, to keep me company so I have no qualms about leaving him in a dog-eating village, I know they will keep him totally safe!) and started packing.

      I didn't even have time to unpack before they were shoving me into the dentist's office the very next morning after my arrival, Peace Corps didn't want to take the risk that the roots of my tooth grow into my jaw bone so my plans to visit the city was put on hold...

     As we drove through downtown Dakar, I was nervous but reassured thinking that I would be knocked out and drugged up during the procedure so I wouldn't be aware of what was going on anyway. That was not the case. They laughed when I asked if I was going under and they scoffed when I asked for laughing gas. 

     "Laughing gas is only for patients who are too freaked out to cooperate with the dentist" they said. "You seem to be completely calm!"

     While the dentists might have been impressed with my calm demeanor, they had greatly mistakened my relaxed state for SHEER PANIC! that literally had me frozen. As I was debating on either faking a panic attack so that they would slap the laughing gas mask on my face or bolting out the door and into the busy street below and never showing my face to the Peace Corps again, the dental assistant walked in. Now, for my friends and family back home who know me, I can easily be mesmerized by members of the opposite sex who I find attractive....and not in a cute or "Hey she's adorably gawking at me" kind of way, but in a "I can't remember my name, much less how to formulate a coherent sentence" kind of way. 

     And so, with my eyes glued on this dark-brown haired, caramel-brown eyed, tall, god of a man, I calmed myself down and submitted to the older and less attractive, kind of smelly and chubby dentist (I called him Chubs in my mind during every appointment in order to humorously relieve some resentment I had towards him) and underwent the whole procedure with local anesthesia. It took about 20 minutes of Chubs digging for the horizontal tooth to give in...lets just say that 20 minutes of digging into my jaw with local anesthesia was not on the top of my bucket list and has probably made my top 10 worst experiences list. Thank goodness for Jack Johnson's mellow voice I jammed to through my headphones (Chubs asked if I was listening to One Direction, I just rolled my eyes).

     Oh, I almost forgot, on top of being awake and fully conscious of what was going on in my mouth, I got sent home with just a bottle of TYLENOL. No real hard pain killers, but TYLENOL. 

     Anyway, this is where this story gets a little better. After Mr. Hot-Stuff-Dental-Assistant so kindly wiped my face clean of the gallons of blood smeared all the way to my ears, I had an internal debate on how I should ask this God-man out...you know as a tour guide for my stay, or something. When we were alone in the surgery room, I opened my mouth to ask if he had plans the rest of his life, or you know just the week would be fine too, and I realized that I couldn't speak. Not the normal, awkward, shy moment where you can't speak when facing a man with the face of an angel, but like, I literally could not open my mouth. All my words came out mumbled and I just sounded, and probably also looked, a bit deranged.

     Get it together Zazie!! 

     I tried again...nothing. The man-god looked up at me from his paperwork and rushed over with a look of concern. 

     "Do you need me to wipe your face again?" He asked. 

     Oh no, oh no! He wants to wipe the slober off my face...this isn't sexy, this isn't even cute!!

     I shook my head no. He sat back down. 

     Say something funny, say ANYTHING, c'mon you can do this! 

     I tried again. 

     "Wa are yu dooen *suck up slober* dis week?"

     There, good job Zaz! 

     I look at him expectantly. He just kind of stared at me in a perplexed way and I sighed, realizing this wasn't going anywhere. Just as I planned to resort to a form of sign language, old Chubs came back in and gave me after-procedure care and ushered me out the door. I got one more peak at that gorgeous assistant of his and sulked my way back to the Peace Corps car waiting for me. 

     The ride home I tried focusing on not slobbering all over the front of my shirt and by the time I got back to the medical unit, happy thoughts of the dental assistant were all gone and replaced by searing hot pain through the whole side of my face, radiating from the crater in my mouth. After a few hours of this throbbing pain, the Peace Corps doctor finally drove over in the middle of the night to bring me Codine...so sweet. Made me throw up but I had gone numb by that time so I managed to get a couple hours of sleep.

     So the rest of my trip went very well (except they pulled another wisdom tooth a week later, this one was straight forward and took 2 minutes), I met a bunch of volunteers from Senegal, enjoyed the great food & huge, air-conditioned supermarkets, went to an actual MALL (I know, it was shocking for me too) and most of all enjoyed as much time as I could on the beach. I visited an ancient slave island, Ile de Goree, where I almost fell off the side of the ferry in excitement when I spotted the beautiful turquoise waters surrounding the island. I swam with the local kids (who also caught the fish I had for lunch that day) and bought some bracelets that were made from the local artisans on the island. I also picked up on some of the local lang, Wolof, while I was in Dakar. 

     Dakar was a great mix of a typical West African city with its street vendors, trash strewn everywhere, bush taxis painted in bright colors, women carrying fruit baskets on their heads and a laid-back surfer town with young Senegalese men walking around the streets with their surfboards tucked under their arms. It was definitely a great trip (minus the teeth) and I would love to go back (without further teeth problems) to spend more time there. 

That sucker laying down

My puppy, Captain! 

Me enjoying some local seafood in Dakar

Ile de Goree (the ancient slave island)

     

Bats in Bagassi

     My 2nd night in the beautiful village of Bagassi I was awakened by a sudden spraying of something that burned and stung a little bit on my legs in the middle of the night. I jolted up in my bug hut and grabbed my headlamp to check the ceiling to see if perhaps the rain had started leaking from holes in my tin roof, or if maybe the mud walls of my house had started melting, and yet I did not see anything suspicious. Immediately as I laid back down I heard a fluttering sound above my head. I quickly turned my headlamp back on and lo - and - behold! Two bats were doing the tango around my bedroom, and I can only assume that the stinging spray I had felt was bat piss (I’ve been in Burkina for 3 months now and have gotten peed on by goats - see Bush Taxi story - my neighbors’ baby and now bats. I see a trend I do not wish to continue). I froze and slowly reached over to grab my blanket and cover myself from any more toxic fluid that may befall me. I attempted to ignore the whoosh of wind I occasionally felt from the wings of the furry, flying rats above me until I fell into a restless sleep.

     The next day I told my neighbor, who had kindly come to set up my solar panel, about the monsters in my room and he simply laughed and told me not to worry about the bats. “They don’t hurt humans” he said…no, maybe not — but I would much rather not have acid piss fall from potentially Ebola-infested bats on me again in the middle of the night, so I walked across the street to the mechanic to see what he had to say about my flying friends. “Oh…bon, c’est pas facile…” he muttered as he shook his head and scratched his chin. Finally he sent his boys (Hamza is 20 and Moctar is 17 and both have grown very protective of me in the past few weeks) over to investigate. Of course no bats were present as they checked around the house so we assumed they were flying out during the day and flying back in at night through the gaps from the mud walls to the tin roof so they plugged the holes with any rags they found around the area and called it a day. 

     While they were doing this, I had about 5 little girls in my courtyard waiting for me to paint their nails and so when the boys left, I went back inside to grab some water for the girls and as I looked up, for no particular reason, I stared straight into the beady eyes of a bundle of bats huddled together in a corner of the room, no doubt terrified at the banging the boys had been doing on the roof. I slowly backed out of the kitchen as they held my stare and screamed for one of the girls to go grab the boys as fast as she could. They not only both came armed with brooms, but they brought their two friends with them (also equipped with brooms) and so I had 4 teenage boys charge into the kitchen like they were Jack Boer raiding a terrorists' hiding spot and without stopping to hesitate, they started whacking! the shit out of the bats. As soon as they began, the bats understandably went berserk and started flying everywhere. At this point, all the little girls had also barged in to watch the spectacle and they ran back and forth back from inside back outside whenever the bats swooped in their direction and were screaming their heads off while the boys were chasing and beating the bats all the while releasing war-cries that probably scared the bats more than the brooms themselves. 

   

     Somehow in all of the chaos I ended up with a baby in my arms (I have absolutely no recollection of being handed the baby, I just remember covering its face as a bat screeched in my direction and suddenly realizing what I was doing and I just stared at the child in my arms in utter confusion). The bats were dropping like flies and every time the boys got one, they would carry it outside by its wing like a trophy. When they were finally finished with their massacre, I made them all wash their hands in bleach water (they wouldn’t be getting Ebola on my watch!) and thanked them profusely. I found 2 more bats over the course of the next few days and the boys ran hurriedly back to continue with their game of cat - and - bat. 

I can happily say that all the bats in my house are now gone and I no longer get awakened by poisonous bat piss in the middle of the night. 

Now for the bats in my latrine….