Bedbugs and Boundaries

Each night, as I’ve been lying in bed going to sleep, I’ve heard a clicking sound. Like an insect or rodent was nibbling at something solid, or, maybe, like some larger insect was communicating with another of its kind. Since it started after Simon fixed the mirror so that it stood high enough to see our faces in, I had assumed that it was an insect – probably a large one like a cockroach – living in the piles of cardboard on which he’d stood the mirror.

Last night, the clicking was so loud that it woke me up. This morning, as I was getting dressed, I noticed a sizeable pile of what looked like sand at the foot of the bed. It turns out that the noise was, in fact, some sort of wood burrowing creature, eating its way through the foot of the bed. There are no holes like you’d expect with woodworm, but the outside of the wood is all cracked, like it’s pushing at it from the inside. Urgh. We have sprayed it with Rambo – strongest insecticide known to man, kills cockroaches which have merely walked through a patch of floor that was once sprayed. In fact, we sprayed so much that the air is still pretty toxic in there – we may end up sleeping on the sofas.

On an entirely different note, I’ve been thinking about boundaries. In the UK, I pride myself on maintaining strong boundaries between my personal and professional life. Here, however, that simply isn’t proving possible. For one thing, many of our colleagues working for the Funder are ex-pats – some are consultants – who are working away from their families. I imagine that for them, their entire life when they’re out here is work, so calling on a Sunday night to discuss meeting times in the upcoming week doesn’t seem odd. For the Nigerians we work with, there simply isn’t the distinction between the two worlds, I don’t think. Either that, or since home life is essentially family and home-based (most of our colleagues don’t seem to do much socialising), friends and colleagues become the same thing. Or perhaps it’s because we’re trying to make friends out here that I’m ignoring the boundary I would hold so strictly at home? Either way, I think I’m going to need a serious acclimatisation course when I return to work in the UK!