My spider experience

South Africa happens to have some of the scariest spiders I have ever seen. The are huge, and I'm not saying they are huge just because I am a total baby and hate spiders, but they are actually huge. Besides the lovely black widows South Africa is home to the wall spider. It is extremely fast, has a very flat body, and super long legs. Some of them are the size of a small hand, and that just isn't ok with me. However, after a few long debates with my new friend Chad, I had decided that I would not try to kill the wall spiders. His winning arguments were that 1 they eat other bugs including mosquitoes, 2 they always stay on the walls, and 3 most of them are too fast to kill anyways. All of these seemed to be valid arguments, so I decided that I would deal with my over the top fear of spiders and let them be.

A few nights later I noticed my new friend the wall spider above my door as I was getting ready to go to bed. After choking down the fear that it was going to leap off the wall and eat me, I decided to just get into bed and pretend it wasn't there. By that I mean I went to be with my flashlight and checked to make sure the stupid spider hadn't moved about every ten minutes until I finally fell asleep. I was very happy to wake up the next morning in one piece, and the spider was still in the same place. It wasn't so bad, and I was proud that I had let the spider live and didn't end up sleeping on the couch. That day when I got home from classes I looked around and saw no spider. I didn't actually like that it was now gone, figuring it could possibly  now be in my bed, but I got distracted by other things and forgot about it. And then came bed time. As I was washing my face in my little bucket, I looked up and noticed Mr. Spider had moved to the opposite wall, right above my bed. So it went spider, window curtain, pillow. Having a spider just chilling above my head wasn't the most ideal situation, but the night before it had been fine so I was just going to go with it. Turns out spiders don't like clapping, so when I tried to kill a mosquito that was flying near the lamp next to my bed, Mr. Spider decided to drop down the curtain. This is when I freaked out. I now had a giant spider somewhere behind the curtain, near my pillow, and eventually my head. As much as I tried to rationalize my fear, take some deep breaths, tell myself that I am bigger than the spider so it is probably more scared of me than I am of it, nothing really seemed to work. So rather than get into bed that night, I moved my pillow to the other end of the bed, took out my super sweet mummy sleeping bag, got in and zipped it all the way up. The only things that were not tightly enclosed by my sleeping bag were my eyes, nose and mouth. I figured that If I was going to be attacked by a killer spider he would have a harder time getting to me if I was cocooned in a sleeping bag than if I was just under some blankets. That was also about the time that I decided being friends with the spiders was not an option, and next time I would have to kill it before I tried to go to bed.

On the first day at my new site I managed to kill my first giant spider all by my self, and I was starting to feel like things were going better with that whole thing. I then went to my outhouse late one night, sat down, looked forward with my head lamp, and came face to face with a black widow. Nothing makes it harder to pee than being watched by the scariest spider you have ever seen. So I am now back to square one, where spiders are the worst bug known to man, and now they dictate when I can and cannot go to the bathroom.