Guatemala Entry Four

Lice Soup and Warrior Tales

Distributed to an email list and published online (2010)

There are moments when I travel when I feel incredibly sexy. My hair, even though it may be unwashed, seems to flip a certain way. My traveling clothes, also unwashed, seem to suit me better than anything cleaner and more stylish, and my backpack is the icing on my cake, more of a trophy than either sapphire or gold. On those days, I feel exotic knowing that to the people whose lives I am passing through, whether they be German or Guatemalan, I am different … foreign.

Yesterday was not one of those days. I felt it in my lungs when I was wheezing for air with a lower respiratory infection and it was confirmed when I saw little bugs squirming on my hair brush. No, it was definitely not a sexy day. But somehow, when you are traveling, even the greatest antithesis of sexy days can feel like an adventure.

I first started to feel sick on Thursday, when we took the kids of Casa Guatemala, all 250 of them, to Rio Frio, an amazing swimming hole an hour and a half walk away. My voice had started to get hoarse and I thought it was because I was overly tired, both from the lack of sleep I’ve had lately and the excess of times I’ve had to raise my voice. It seems like nothing gets done around here without a loud voice. Most of the time the kids just don’t respond to a normal tone. They don’t see any urgency in getting in line, getting in the shower, getting up, etc. unless you are speaking several decibels louder than anything else in their immediate proximity. I thought that the day at the river would be a relaxing time and would allow me the chance to rest up. But my voice only seemed to get worse. By Friday morning I had a hollow cough and almost no voice at all. Luckily, a nurse was visiting and checked my lungs with her stethoscope. She diagnosed me with a lower respiratory infection and sent me to bed.

It was in bed that my head just wouldn’t stop itching. I would get close to sleeping and then the squirming in my scalp would drag my fingers up to scratch, scratch, scratch. Now, I can’t plead total ignorance here. Last week I was getting out of the shower and putting my hair behind my ear when a big bug was swept under my fingernail. I had Eleni check my hair for lice and she found eggs and some little bugs. Somehow, I felt that if I ignored them they would go away. I thought to myself, ‘Why, I wash my hair every day. Surely they will all fall out while I shower.’ But the problem did not go away. Indeed, I would scratch my head and my hand would come away from my scalp with little pieces of bug, my head somehow itching worse than before I scratched.

Something had to be done about this. The nurse had given me some peppermint essential oil to put in boiling water and inhale, for my cough, so I went over to the volunteers house for a self-proclaimed wellness afternoon. I did as I was instructed and tackled the cough first. I boiled water, added the essential oil, threw a sheet over my head, and inhaled until the water was cold. I was doing all of this in the kitchen, where it was most convenient, and was in the middle of breathing in and out, in and out, when people started to wander in. They were still there, chatting, when I could postpone things no longer. I had to take the sheet off my head and emerge from my steam bath. Their eyes got wide when they saw me. I suppose I was a marvelously undone sight. My hair was messily pulled back, I was dripping sweat from my red face, and I was wheezing to top everything off. When I tried to explain to them what I was doing, in a sick voice reminiscent of a pre-adolescent boy, they laughed. Not the kind of laugh where they are making fun of you, thank goodness, but the kind of laugh where you know you have somehow just amused them tremendously and made their day.

But the scene had to continue; I had more to do. I rinsed my face with cold water and wet my hair in the sink. I was about to declare war on some bugs. A few days ago someone left lice shampoo in my bedroom. It was a new, colorful bottle and we couldn’t figure out whose it was. There was even a lice comb to go along with it. I had struck gold.

Now, I know that by this point many of you are grossed out. In the United States, having lice is a disgusting, embarrassing thing. When a kid is discovered to have lice, notes are sent home to the parents of the other children, warning them that little Suzie or Johnny may have been contaminated. In Vancouver, Canada, you can get sent home for a week for having lice. Here at Casa Guatemala, it is normal for the kids to get lice. Most of them battle it continuously. They are always cross-contaminating each other through community hair brushes, hair bands, close contact, etc. A couple of weeks ago I was helping Mariona and Eleni take lice out of our girls’ hair when we saw several proudly comparing numbers. No, the winner was not the one with the fewest bugs; it was the one with the most.

For the volunteers here, getting lice is proof that you are doing a good job. If you are hugging the kids and playing with them, it is pretty inevitable that lice will invade your hair. Most volunteers wage a continuous battle like the children. You get lice, you get rid of them, then you get them all over again. And that’s how it goes for the time you are here.

I was always proud that I had never gotten lice as a child. In some way it made me feel superior, clean. This is the first time I have had to deal with the problem; my education in eradicating it has been quick. For those of you who are curious, the first thing you must do is wash your hair with a special shampoo that contains pesticides. You let it sit in your hair for 15 minutes and then wash it out. You are supposed to repeat the process three days later to kill any additional eggs that have hatched. Once the lice shampoo has been rinsed out, it is necessary to spread either butter or conditioner through your hair. Then the job becomes combing with a special lice comb. You work the comb through your hair and the lice stick to the butter or conditioner and stick to the comb. You then wipe the lice off the comb and onto a white towel and kill any living ones with your fingernail. Sometimes the lice are tough to get out of the comb and it helps to have a little bowl of vinegar to swirl the comb in. The vinegar helps to dislodge the lice and kill them.

The whole process of combing takes about 45 minutes if you are thorough. It’s amazing what kind of bugs you come across, the little ones with lots of squirming legs and the bigger ones that look like fleas. To amuse myself during my combing I named the concoction I was creating: lice soup. I tell you, it was very satisfying to watch the little buggers drown in that vinegar. It felt extremely good to get them out of my hair.

I am not the only cold-blooded killer around here, though. If anything, I have learned my skills from the Niñas Pequeñas. Shy and helpless orphans they are not. When it comes to massacring lice or spiders, they are the masters. One afternoon during shower time I was summoned by screaming voices to the back shower stall. But the screams I heard were not ones of fear. I believe it was some sort of a battle cry. Three dripping wet, naked little girls had brooms and were attacking a very big spider that was trying to run for cover. When they finally succeeded in paralyzing the thing they removed it from the shower and left me to finish it off. Honestly, I didn’t want to go near the spider. It was a huge black thing with a very round belly and skinny legs. In size it was comparable to a tarantula. But I couldn’t let my girls see that their fearless leader was, in fact, fearful. I carried the spider outside with a broom and squished him extra hard with my shoe. When I felt, more than heard, the fateful splat I congratulated myself that I, along with a group of five year olds, had made the world a safer place.

The Niñas Pequeñas have done more than just give me lice and teach me how to kill spiders. This week they also taught me basic plumbing. One of the toilets in our bathroom wouldn’t flush and a six-year old patiently showed me how to fill a bucket full with water and pour it into the toilet bowl. I was pretty impressed when I saw that with the addition of extra water at a high speed the toilet seemed to recover its composure and flushed everything down. Another morning this week I came into the bathroom to find a seven-year old kneeling on the bathroom counter. She had in her hands, of all things, a plunger. I had noticed the sink was slow when the girls were brushing their teeth but Belsi decided to solve the problem herself. She plunged until the water went down and then replaced the plunger under the sink and went about the rest of her morning routine as if nothing had happened. I, meanwhile, couldn’t help looking at her with a mixture of shock, awe, and admiration. She was my hero.

If an itchy scalp, bugs in my hair, and un-sexy days are the price to be paid for getting to know these heroes, consider me paid in full. All I can say is that every daddy-long-leg spider in Washington had better hope I stay in Guatemala. Once I perfect my new battle cry and Niña Pequeña warrior tactics, they are doomed for extinction.