My house in Tanzania could have been an insectarium. Maybe I should have charged admission to tourists.
One year, the kitchen was infested with cockroaches. The little ones would run out of the toaster and I would smash them with my fist.
Another year, it was ticks. Like, literally, ticks were climbing the walls of my kitchen. The engorged ones would burst open and then the live ones would leave tiny bloody footprints on the floor.
Twice, guests in our home were stung by centipedes in their beds in the middle of the night.
Then there was the Year of the Millipedes, which don’t sting but, at six inches long, are unpleasant to find curled up on your wooden spoon or inside your shoe. Johnny spent months sharing Josiah’s bed due to millipede-phobia. Josiah once smashed one with a hammer, triumphantly announcing that he had killed his prey. I usually picked them up with my fingers and flushed them alive down the toilet.
Each time we victoriously exterminated one species, another moved in.
But we didn’t have it so bad. My friend Alyssa lived in a house infested with snakes, and after the seventeenth one, they finally moved. Their new house’s attic was infested with bats, and the guano sprinkled like glitter over her children’s beds. So millipedes? No biggie.
My house had a miniature kitchen sink that couldn’t fit my biggest pot. It had weird pink tiles in the living room and all sorts of half-steps throughout the rooms that guests tripped over. It had no cross-breeze, and so was hot and stuffy. The windows were always open, leaving a fine layer of dust on everything.
My friend Lucy and her family of six lived in a home where she bought 25 gallons of water each day from a neighbor half a block away. It cost her about 15 percent of her monthly salary, and she carried that water in buckets back to her house.
My house had tiled floors and polished wood ceilings. I had indoor plumbing and electricity that worked most times and a generator when it didn’t. I had an air conditioner in my bedroom to push out the tropical heat while we slept. Bugs and all, compared to Lucy, I lived in luxury.
Yet Lucy considered herself blessed because she only had to walk half a block to get water, instead of the miles that many women in Tanzania have to walk. She and her husband owned their cinderblock home. Her roof boasted a solar panel so they could run fans at night. By Tanzanian standards, they were almost middle class. “We are poor,” she told me once, with a twinkle in her eye (Lucy’s eyes were always twinkling), “But we are not very, very poor.”
So how could I whine about my bugs? Despite them, I was still freakishly wealthy. I was surrounded by people who had it way worse than we did. So I went along smashing and flushing bugs, and I was content.
When we moved into our home in California, it felt like I was living in a vacation rental. I had vaulted ceilings and large windows with a cascade of light. I had a walk-in closet. I had a giant sink and a dishwasher. Every night when I turned off the lights, I would stand on the stairwell and gaze at it all, disbelieving that I lived there. I had zero bugs.
Six months later, I was walking around my neighborhood and came to the housing development next to ours. I noticed differences: these houses were a bit larger. Nicer trimmings. More spacious driveways. That would be nice, I thought. Maybe we should have held out for a house in this neighborhood instead.
Discontentment descended in a flash.