My Rite of Passage

To go to the bathroom here (let's get down to it), you squat on two bricks over a hole in the ground. It is called a kabone. My family's kabone is down the street with the pigs. Plus, you can't go outside when it's dark out (circa 6pm) for fear of dogs and witches, obviously. So at night you get a po (pronounced poh)--a lovely bucket with a lid that you get to clean in the morning (I clean mine in a creek--not the same one we get water from, don't worry). In any case, so one night around my first week, before bed, I saw a spider in my room about the size of my hand (we're talking body to palm here). I thought about making a brother deal with it, but realized that for ME, this is the worst that could happen, really. So I had to deal with it myself. So I got my po, and I scraped the thing into it with cardboard (and that thing CLUNG to the wall), then flung him out the window, only he wouldn't fling and so I had to bang my po on the wall to knock it out and the handle broke off, but the spider did fall out. I spent the next 15 minutes shaking visibly (ha). I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to explain to my family what the hey the handle to my po was doing around the corner outside of our house. Africa is officially my home.