A Slight Change of Plans part 5 of 8

We used the one stool in the house as a makeshift barrier over the hole in the floor. With nothing else much to do in the now-dark house, we all settled in for what promised to be a sleepless night. For the next couple of hours I drifted in and out of shallow sleep. I could hear bodies shifting as they tried to get comfortable on the wooden floor. Somewhere around 11:00 or 11:30 I heard the homeowner noisily re-enter the house. Apparently, he had slipped out earlier in the night when I wasn’t paying attention. Who could blame him? His house had been overrun by fourteen-year-olds from Hong Kong. In the darkness, I heard him rummaging around the big room. Oblivious to all the bodies sprawled about the floor, he started opening and closing drawers in the sideboard. He went into one of the side rooms and then came back out them back in and then came back out. I heard a large racket that sounded like dozens of empty plastic water bottles cascading to the floor. He flipped on the single overhead bulb which earlier had seemed so dim but now seemed like a miniature sun.

I wanted to shush him, but didn’t know the social etiquette for dealing with a crazy home owner while sleeping on his floor with eighteen eighth graders after showing up unannounced in his Indonesian village. I am pretty sure there is not a chapter on that in the Cross-cultural Training Manual. I heard him banging around on the other side of the big room and realized that he had decided that 11:40 p.m. was a perfectly reasonable time to repair the broken floor board.

Eventually, the old man quieted down and turned in for the night. I must have fallen into a slightly deeper sleep myself, because at 1:15 I woke up with a start, jerked back my right hand which had been sprawled out onto the wooden floor, and let out a cry. Eric woke. By the moon light that was coming in through the far door, I could see him looking at me waiting for an explanation. I paused for a second so as not to seem too panicky and took a breath to calm myself. With the calmest tone I could muster, I explained, “Something was gnawing on my thumb.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, but there wasn’t much he or I could do in the middle of the night. He rolled over and closed his eyes. I rubbed my elbow and only then realized that in between jerking my hand back and crying out, I had slammed my elbow on the floor in an attempt to scare away whatever nocturnal critter had decided to test whether or not I would make a tasty midnight snack.