Fredericks of Guyana

By Kristen Hare
Guyana, 2000-2002
  By the time my mom and sister came to visit for my first Christmas in Guyana, I had been through all the early stages of settling in to the Peace Corps.

  There were the very early days, when I felt dazzled by my own bravery for setting out on such an adventure. 

  Two days later, there were about three months of absolute humility and doubt, where I lay under my flowy mosquito net each night listening to Mariah Carey and Meatloaf as rain fell on the tin roof, silently counting the days until I was home again.

Lot 12, Adventure, Guyana, 2000

  There was a growing understanding of how I was expected to behave if I wanted to be accepted (no drinking beer in public and no drinking from bottles, period.)

  And there was an appreciation, slow-growing, for the way beauty and ugliness lived side by side in Guyana.

  So by the time my mom and sister came, I knew my way around the market, knew how to cook a few dishes, how to navigate around the loud and aggressive mini-bus drivers, and how to wash my own clothes by hand. 

  It was after their visit when the first sign of trouble appeared -- in my laundry basket.

In the top house where I lived, I washed my intimates in the kitchen sink or in sloshy buckets in the tiled shower, then hung them in the yellow wooden bathroom to dry. I figured the spectacle of a big, tall white girl was quite enough without adding her big, tall underwear to flutter in the near-equatorial sun. 

  Standing in front of the kitchen sink one January day, I pulled a pair out from my laundry basket and immersed it in the soapy water. As I began to scrub, I noticed a hole. In the crotch?

  Weird.

  Life in Guyana felt so hard in such fundamental ways, though, that it didn’t phase me much to consider that my underwear would just give up. I tossed it aside and grabbed the next pair. 

  Soak. Scrub. Hole.

  Weird.

  Another: Soak. Scrub. Hole.

  Now I was curious. So I grabbed every pair of underwear in my basket and found in every single pair a hole in the crotch.

  I stood there staring at my underwear for a while. 

  Finally, I dropped them all into the trash, hoping what little stock of sturdy American panties that remained fully-crotched would last until my next trip to the capitol. When I did make it to Georgetown a few weeks later, I mentioned the mystery of the missing crotch to a fellow volunteer, who wondered if I had a caustic crotch. Possible, I thought. Maybe it was the malaria medicine. So I started washing my panties while in the shower instead of leaving them in my laundry basket to apparently fester and fizzle away.

  Again, a few weeks passed, my underwear remained in tact, and for a bit I forgot about the whole thing. Then, after a day of teaching, I came home, sticky with a mix of dust, sweat and sunblock, and melted into my hammock for a nap. 

  Something made me open my eyes. 

  And when I did, that something sat directly in my line of sight -- a large gray rat, perched contentedly on one of the ceiling beams.

  It wasn't creeping from my laundry basket or caught with a strip of panty on one tooth, but seeing that rat made it all click into place. 

  Those missing crotches didn’t fizzle away. 

  They were chewed out. 

  “The crotch rat,” I whispered to myself, awed and totally disgusted that such a thing could exist. 

  But it did. It did. 

  And while swinging in my hammock or sleeping under my dreamy mosquito net, feeling all together quite impressed with myself for making it through another day, the crotch rat crawled into my laundry basket and had a little snack.