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Rats - living and even sleeping with rats - a lesson in being thankful!



Rats are one of the most resilient rodents on this globe. They take care of their orphaned young, and they survive on whatever they can find, and in whatever nests they can make – all over the globe.

Both of my sisters had had experiences with rats (in Canada and in Uganda), and while I had seen the odd rat at a distance, I had never had to deal with living with them –let-alone sleeping with them!

At home in the village there is a small variety of rat (from my limited knowledge of rodents, I would have called them mice). There are several problems with having rats around, but aside from their stealing food, and possibly spreading disease, if not just urinating on personal belongings (such as children’s car seats being stored in a hut!), they attract snakes. So, when we had a tribe of rats, numbering in the hundreds, living close to our hut, and after having one of them drown in our drinking water (inside our hut – such a horrible sound to wake up to!), we destroyed their main home and destroyed several nests to get rid of them.

I thought that that would be the extent to my living with rats, and I was not prepared for the sleepless night at a friend’s home. The hut was literally infested with rats! Thank God that our children did not notice them, but Samuel and I did not sleep for most of the night. We were actually sharing a bunk bed, with Samuel on top, and me on the bottom with our youngest. I had music playing on my phone to help drown out the noise of little rustling feet, scrummaging through a bag of dried corn, climbing up to a nest in the roof, and climbing in and out of a window –moving the shutters each time. But when I turned on the torch on my phone and shone it beside my head, it was difficult to go back to sleep, knowing that just on the other side of a thin mosquito net, the rats were running up and down our bunk bed frame!

But, thankfully, we did sleep for a couple of hours, and while there was a lot of droppings around the hut and on the top bunk of one of our children’s beds, no harm was done, and we learnt a lesson in thankfulness for not having to live with rats all of the time!

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