Mission Memories Monday: Roaches!

Montgomery 1st Ward was my first area of service on my mission. It was a middle to upper-class area and our apartment was one of the nicer ones I lived in during my time in the mission. I was only there a month, and it was a fairly hard area to serve in. Middle to upper-class people tend to be at work all day and not inclined to let missionaries in when they are home--which leads to knocking on a lot of doors of empty houses during the day and a lot of rejection knocking on doors in the evenings. But one of the perks of living in a nicer apartment was the lack of roaches. My trainer, who had been out a year, and had lots of experience with Alabama roaches, felt duty-bound to warn me about the roaches that she was sure I would be experiencing in the near future. "You should see the tree roaches, Sister Pew! They are HUGE!" This went on for several days, all the while with me inwardly shuddering as I pictured roaches the size of my hand (or larger!)

I had been terrified by roaches in my younger years when I lived in Houston. I still remember crying when I had to take the garbage out to the cans in the garage because you could be certain to have 3 or 4 roaches dart in your face when you lifted the garbage can lid. And some mornings you would find one wiggling and drowning in the toilet. Sometimes you would see one on the wall and it would FLY IN YOUR FACE! Ugh! So, as a greenie missionary I comforted myself with the thought that I was older now. I had survived encounters with roaches as a child, so I could just buck up and handle it now as a missionary, even if the roaches were even larger (shudder.)

One day a few weeks later, as we were out tracting (as always) we approached a house with a porch and Sister Jones said, "Look, Sister Pew! There is one of the tree roaches I've been telling you about! Look how HUGE it is!" I looked down to see a dead roach lying upside down on the porch. And it was normal roach-size. I was surprised. I turned to Sister Jones and with bewilderment asked, "What size are the normal roaches?" I think she was disappointed at my calm reaction. She showed me with her fingers--about 1/2 inch long! "Oh!" I thought. "That's small! I didn't realize that roaches could be so small!" I realized that all the time Sister Jones was describing HUGE tree roaches, I wasn't realizing that the roaches of my youth in Houston WERE tree roaches. That is the only kind I knew about. The 2-inch long, flying variety was all I had ever known. Duh! My childhood home in Houston was on a lot that had over 100 trees in the back yard and probably at least 50 in the front yard. Of course those roaches were TREE roaches. I should have realized.

I had plenty of opportunities to become acquainted with the smaller varieties of roaches in several of my apartments later in my mission. My third apartment in Montgomery 3rd Ward was so over-run with the little ones that we purchased a bug bomb once and came home that night to the scene of a roach holocaust on our kitchen floor. Gross!

My fifth apartment in Athens, AL, was in the basement of a building that served as an army hospital during the civil war. It was so over-run with roaches that you washed your cereal bowl BEFORE using it in the morning because you weren't sure how many things had been crawling on it in the cupboard since you washed it and put it in there the day before. One day I even washed my bowl, set it on the counter, turned to grab my cereal box, and turned back just in time to see a little roach run across the counter and into and out of my bowl. So my bowl got washed twice that morning before I used it.

Shortly after the cereal bowl experience, I awoke in the middle of the night when a roach ran up my leg! I suspect it was my description of this experience in my weekly letter t0 the mission president that prompted him to call and tell us to look for a better apartment in the area. That was just fine with us--that was the apartment that we also boasted had a "moat" around the entire outside circumference of the living room--an area that always seemed to be damp and smelled like it was growing mold. When we were in the process of moving out of that apartment, we ran into the exterminator who was happy to meet us because, "For some reason, the landlord doesn't have a key to your apartment so I can never get in to spray your apartment when I do all the others." Well, that explained a lot. Every month when he would come spray, all the vermin in the entire building would flee to our apartment--the safe harbor!

I still didn't mind the little guys as much as the big ones, even when they would startle me by crawling down my arm in the middle of teaching a discussion to someone in the projects. One morning in my third apartment we were greeted by a smallish tree roach in the bathtub (see photo above.) I still found the tree roaches to be more troublesome--maybe because they are big enough that you can see every disgusting detail of their slimy bodies and wiggly legs. And they can fly.