Cockroach Cookies and Vacuuming for Spiders

I may have mentioned it before, but Bugs R Us. Something about this
tropical climate and a bamboo house. Critters are a theme around
here. We are getting ready to come out of the tribe for a seven-week
stint to help out at the Puerto Center. So to get the house ready to
pack up and leave for awhile, I did a couple of things. Yesterday, I
made a batch of roach cookies, and this morning, Bill and I had a
spider vacuuming session.

When we were new in the tribe, the cockroaches would get into
EVERYTHING and nearly drove me batty. Until I discovered Roach
Cookies. Hurray! Insanity temporarily averted. A veteran missionary
gave me the recipe:
1/4 kilo boric acid powder
1 cup flour
1 small, finely chopped onion
a little bit of milk

You mix it all together, to a really stiff dough, and shape into
little balls, then dry, and then place around in all the dark corners
of your drawers and closets, out of reach of pets and children. It
really works. The cockroaches die, and are no more. Well, for the
most part. Some manage to evade the stuff. But all in all, those
cookies do wonders. Bill says the roaches get homemade cookies more
often than we do. But that's not really true -- the roach cookies are
good for about three months.

We used to be able to get the boric acid at the local drugstore
chain, or at our Puerto grocery store. Then, this time moving back to
the tribe again, boric acid disappeared from the stores. I looked and
looked all over Puerto and all over Manila. The cockroaches were
coming back, and starting to drive me crazy again. It was a grim
situation. Then last August, I got the Manila Yellow Pages, and
looked up chemical companies, and started calling around. I finally
found one company that would sell a few pounds of boric acid powder. (Others wanted to sell me a 100 pound bag of the stuff.) It was a long, long taxi ride out to the chemical plant, but totally worth it. The cockroaches are under control once again.

For most bugs you have Raid. But spiders, that is another story. Our
friend Dave, the Bug Man, gave us a tip on one of our furloughs when I
was complaining to him about the spiders taking over our house. How
do you get rid of them, I wanted to know. He explained that spiders
have spiracles, or breathing tubes, that they can close at will. So
if you spray them with bug spray, they just close their spiracles,
and keep on living. Dave's advice was to smash them or vacuum them
up. So one of my proud acquisitions that furlough was a little vacuum
cleaner that I shipped over to the Philippines and flew into the
tribe. Not for our lone 4x6-foot patch of carpet, but for the
spiders. About once a month or so, Bill and I get it out, fit an 8-
foot-long PVC pipe on the end of the wand and vacuum away up in the
rafters, where so many of the spiders love to live. It is really
satisfying to suck up the egg sacks and know I won't be having
hundreds of baby Charlottes raining down inside my house.

But for the big guys, the spiders the size of my hand, that appear in
the house every once in awhile, I have another solution. When I see
one, I call, 'Help!' to my wonderful hero of a husband, and he'll
comes and smashes it with his flip-flop. They are huge, and really
quick, too. I don't think they bite, but I wouldn't want to stick
around long enough to find out. There was one just the other day on
the window sill just over my laptop. A little bit creepy. I was in
too much of a hurry to see it dead to think of getting a picture of
it. Sorry.