Peace Corps Letter

My son, Jon served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa in 2002.   Our lives centered on waiting for each of his letters for the 27 months that he lived in a small, isolated, rural village called Koro Bada.  

Jon knows my aversion to spiders and wrote the following for me:

…Oh yeah, mom I promised that I would write about the spiders.  Cekoroba yayoroba (spelling?) is a lean spider about 3 inches long with large stiff front legs.  Cekoroba is a respectful term used for elderly men, it literally means stiff or set in their ways.  The front legs give them an ungraceful walk which doesn’t enable them to go fast.  The cekoroba on the other hand is all about speed and deception.  

For about 3 nights when it was raining I had to sleep inside.  For some reason they were particularly active that day.  I found one running across my wall so I got out my field lamp and fly swatter and we fought back and forth for half an hour. 

Once I went to whack him while he was on the wall and he jumped a good 2 feet off the wall and scared the shit out of me.  Other times he chased me or hid under the bed/sofa making darting attacks. 

Finally after expending much of my energy, I got him with the fly swatter and smacked him ruthlessly.  I was relieved and began to sweep him towards the door.  That crazy spider was playing dead, jumped up and ran under a chair.  I traded the fly swatter (key word “fly”) for  a good stick and commenced pummeling the cekoroba till he was pretty much pulp.  The others heard about this and continued to torture me for the rest of the night.

One incident; while lying on the bed I looked over at the wall and saw a medium sized cekoroba on the wall.  I rolled off my bed to grab my lantern and right next to the lantern was another one waiting to ambush me.  Yes, diversionary tactics and predation.  They are smart, fast and not the least bit dangerous.  Or maybe that’s what they want you to think…"

I find it even funnier that his tale of the spiders which I really dislike should be one of my favorites that we received from him.  When I checked on line, I found that a lot of Peace Corps volunteers have written about the wily cekoroba.