#77

Last night my roommates and I settled into bed, cocooned in our mosquito nets and hoping for an insect-free sleep. Insects turned out to be the least of our worries. 20 minutes after we got into bed we heard a mysterious flapping sound that definitely did not belong to a moth or a fly and spent the next few minutes arguing over who would make the dangerous dash to switch the light on. There was absolutely no way I was leaving my bed in the dark and fortunately Marie-Ann eventually stepped up and scurried over to the light switch. It turned out that the two bats perched on our ceiling didn´t like the light being switched on, and the three of us definitely didn´t like seeing the bats hanging above us. Marie-Ann had retreated back to her bed and we all sat there freaking out while the bats flashed their huge wings and fluttered around above us.

Yvan was out and the rest of the house was asleep, so it was really up to the three of us to deal with the bat situation. As 3 girls scared of pretty much everything in the jungle, there really couldn't have been a worse team tasked with bat removal. They eventually settled down and we decided that the hole they had come in through on the roof was far too small for us to coax them towards. This left our bedroom door as the only place for them to exit through. Not really knowing anything about the bats and whether they might bite us, we used our mosquito nets as armour over our pyjamas. Our plan was simple and quite stupid. We grabbed a couple of brooms from the hallway, opened the door as wide as we could and then just sort of motioned the bats towards the exit with the poles of each broom. They didn't particularly enjoy this, and spent the next 5 minutes flapping around while we sheltered under the bunk beds panicking that they were preparing to attack. Round 2 of bat evacuation went slightly better, and after a brief crazy flapping session we managed to slowly motion them towards the door with a few swishes of each pole. It felt truly ridiculous jumping around in our mosquito nets, threatening bats with brooms, but they just looked so menacing when they spread their wings out that we continued with our strategy. After 5 minutes of no movement and lots of broom waving, Marie-Ann produced the winning move and, as if it hadn´t been the obvious thing to do for the past 20 minutes, the bats both flapped out of our bedroom door and we shut it firmly behind them. Hopefully Yvan doesn't mind bats in the rest of the house because that´s probably where they spent the rest of the night.

The whole situation was both hilarious and terrifying and after much consideration I decided that I was very much done with jungle life. Unable to sleep properly after bat-gate I got up at 4am, packed my bags and waited to say thank you and goodbye to Yvan at 7am the next morning. I took this picture of the volunteer house as I was leaving...the bats may or may not still be inside.