In which I am not brave mouse eyes

I meant to go back to my village today after spending the past 10 days in Dakar helping with an English camp for middle school kids.  But five minutes into my bike ride home, I realized I forgot the key to my hut (some things don't change no matter what continent you live on...), so it was back to the Peace Corps house to search for it. 

I was looking through my metal trunk for the key when a mouse squirted out from under a book, slammed itself against the inside wall of the trunk, made a frantic attempt to leap out, and failed, only to bury itself again under my clothes. Living here has made me much braver when it comes to many things, such as spiders and germs, but I really hate mice. The Tamba Peace Corps house is infested with them, and there's one that lives in my hut too. Up in the thatch. With the spiders. I hear it squeaking at night. Ick. 

So I had to take everything out of my trunk, piece by piece so as not to accidentally touch the mouse with my hand or allow it to escape, since it seemed necessary to either kill it or get it out of the house. Once the mouse was the last remaining item in the trunk, Shames was nice enough to catch it in a plastic bag. But what do you do with a mouse in a plastic bag?  Drop it in the well?  Machete it? In the end, he just dropped it and it scurried away to make a nest in someone else's stuff. 

After all that, I didn't have enough time to get to my village before sunset, so I called my host father and explained the entire story to him, which he thought was pretty funny because everyone in my village knows that I am, as they say in Mandinka, not brave when I see the eyes of the mouse. Or more literally, not brave mouse eyes. 

In my own defense, I am impressively brave in the eyes of frogs.  Senegalese people on the other hand, react to frogs much like my mom reacts to cockroaches. Which is to say, shrieking and running away. Yes, frogs. Cute, ribbiting, not-scary-at-all frogs.  Just goes to show how cultural these things are.