March 2 - Pest Control

The Travel Tent, a portable mosquito net available from http://www.longroad.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.100.exe/?E+scstore.

By Magdalena I. García


Fly spray: an old favorite toy weapon from my childhood. Photo taken from Wikipedia.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_spray.

Ever since I was a child I’ve been terrified of mice and rats. I attribute this to the fact that in Cuba we lived next door to my father’s grocery store, where plenty of rodents made their home among the sacks of rice, beans, sugar and other goods. I also was afraid of dogs, because one of our neighbors had a dog who always barked loudly at all the kids. One time this obnoxious canine chased me, jumping and growling, and sunk its teeth into my heel. But perhaps the worst plague was dealing with mosquitoes.

In the Caribbean mosquitoes are a constant annoyance. They never quite go away, and during the rainy season they are present en masse even in the city. They buzz loudly as they fly past your ear, and bite much faster than you can manage to fan them or slap them off your skin.

In the Cuba of my childhood, our standard protection against this pest included the use of mosquiteros (mosquito nets). I still remember how our bedtime ritual included putting up four sticks with a hook or nail at the top, one on each corner of the bed, so that we could hang our mosquito net. Then you had to crawl into bed, being careful not to let any mosquitoes in, and pull the edge of the mosquitero under the mattress.

For the long, hot evenings when mosquitoes invaded our living room and made it almost impossible to sit still, the line of defense included an old can with a pump attached: fly spray. I’m not exactly sure what kind of funky-smelling insecticide was stored in the can, but it worked. And kids loved to get a chance to try their hand at the pump.

Every once in a while I have to put up with the buzzing and biting of people who can be more annoying than a plague of Caribbean mosquitoes. At such moments, how I wish I could reach for that old spray can, or hide under the mosquitero. How I wish I could find the right way to say: “The bug stops here!”