Machetes, Spiders, and Sugar Cane

It has been a pretty interesting week! This week started off what they call here the safra. Pretty much all of the guys in the whole town go to cut millions of acres of sugar cane. So there´s not really any men around other than the ones that have regular jobs. The people here go cut sugar cane and get paid enough to make it to the next year, so a lot of them don´t work all year. Cutting sugar cane is apparently very physically demanding, especially in the heat here, so in order to cut enough sugar to have money for the whole year, they all use a mixture of drugs to work harder and longer. One of them makes them sweat cold-for the heat- and helps the body to not feel exhaustion. But this makes them incredibly sleepy, so they take a ton of caffeine to stay awake... It´s great…

 In the spirit of the sugar season, we decided to cut our front lawn, and lacking tools, used a machete J It was super fun for about 5 minutes, until we used an hour of our P-day to do what would take 8 seconds with a lawnmower.

 

Finally, we came face to face with one of earths ugliest creations ever. I was able to document it´s existence with my camera, but sadly didn´t bring it today, because we have divisions with our District leader and I didn´t want to carry it around all day. But I will describe the scene for ya´ll. We got home after a regular day of teaching lessons, went in the house and turned on the fan, because even at 9:20pm it is way too hot! We planned our next day and did various things that needed done. I changed into shorts and flipflops and went into the bathroom to.. well.. use the bathroom, and to my horror discovered the 8 legged freak that starred in the movie “8 Legged Freaks” (A mediocre movie I watched quite a while ago).But this guy was seriously way too big.

 

All of you that have known me for any time probably know that I have a little bit of an irrational fear of our 8 legged co-inhabitants. But there was nothing irrational about the fear of this monster. It was the size of my hand (I´ve got the pictures too!) an ugly hairy brown color, and just chilling in our bathroom. My companion brought the RAID for large insects that we have, and gave it a little taste of chemical engineering, after which it crawled into the corner and supposedly died. Remembering an experience of one of my youth leaders about a large spider that got away while he went to get something to use to kill it, I stayed and watched... And sure enough after about 2 minutes it sprang back to life! At this point my companion was talking with our district leader about our day, and I was left alone to battle the thing. Using the indiscriminant justice of chemical warfare, I painted the small animal we call spider with toxic venom, and once more it died. Not trusting even the chains of death I waited- and sure enough, he rose the second time from his tile grave. I then fought with it the third time and sealed his fate and he died. Finally. Then, about 3 days later, we found another one, larger than the first, in our bathroom. The same things happened, except I used a broom instead of chemical death. Quite the harrowing experiences.

 Thanks for the biscuit recipe. I´ll have to make them in a frying pan, but we´ll see what happens. Also, the photo albums you sent are one of the most precious things that I have, so-good job! J

As always, with love,

Elder Rice