Hearing the phrase “if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger” is never a good sign. It usually means that someone is trying to spin something in your favor, trying to sympathize with your plight and commiserate with you in your misery. It also doesn’t usually make you feel a whole lot better.
But, so it was last Tuesday afternoon as I was walking home from the supermarket, flea bomb in hand, that my friend Bridget told me just that: Well, I guess if it won’t kill us it will at least make us stronger. She was, of course, speaking of that piece of the campo that we’d brought home with us, the fleas.
Last Friday morning I woke up and, in the course of showering and getting dressed, began noticing some bites on my legs. I didn’t think much of it at the time—sleeping in the Shebang has brought much worse than a few spider-looking bites on my legs. They itched a bit, but again, I’d had much worse. Bridget also had some bites, and was convinced she had fleas. (At this point I still thought she was crazy, and made sure to let her know each and every time she told me about them. I even laughed at the idea, which, looking back was a terrible idea and ended up being a lesson in Karma.) I was, on Saturday morning, still of the opinion that my bites were simply errant spider bites, just a holdover from the campo. Merely a visitor who wanted to see Cusco from the vantage of my leg and got hungry along the way.
Every day, though, I woke up with a few new bites that were beginning to itch worse than any bites—mosquito or spider—that I’d had in the past. They were also pretty big, maybe ½ centimeter in diameter which, although it may not seem like a lot, begins to look like it when there are 20 of them covering your leg. When I spoke to Mom on Sunday night I mentioned the bites to her and she told me I should talk to my host mom, to see if she had any ideas about the bites. With new ones appearing daily I was beginning to come around to Bridget’s flea theory—albeit begrudgingly.
Monday morning dawned with five new bites, which had now migrated now from my right leg to my left, and up to my stomach. At breakfast I showed my host mom a few of them and asked her what she thought they were.
“Oh, you’ve got pulgas,” she said.
Now, I have taken seven years of Spanish; I could explain the usages of the subjunctive tense, the difference between por and para and idioms with the verb tener. The word pulgas, however, was one with which I was not familiar. So, when my mom told me I had them, I just assumed it was Peruvian Spanish for generic bug bite. (Pulga is not a word one comes across in the thematic vocabulary of Spanish textbooks in the US—which theme would that fall under, “vermin that infest your bedroom”? That has never been a chapter heading, but maybe I’m just using the wrong books.)
When I got to school that day I told Bridget not to worry, that it was okay, that I just had pulgas!
“Julie, pulgas are fleas.”
Well, there it was: karma, come to bite me in the ass. Oh Jesus, I thought. I’d had a dog for 13 years and not once did the thought of fleas even cross my mind. Now, five days in the campo and my body was an all-you-can-eat buffet that happened to be popular with a good portion of the fleas in Corporaque. It took me a few minutes of arguing, but after having everyone else assure me that pulgas were indeed fleas, my period of denial was over and I’d moved into the next phase of my grieving: acceptance.
“Alright, well what the hell are we going to do about our fleas, then,” I asked Bridget, although only half-heatedly, because I really didn’t care to know the answer.
“Well Irma (=director of the program), told me that we need to spray down everything in our rooms with flea spray. Then we need to do it again, with some kind of spray that is even more powerful than the first. We need to do it in the morning, because we can’t go into our rooms for 8 hours after we spray,” she told me.
We walked home, half laughing and half incredulous at our situation: we were here, living in Peru, with fleas. Was that a joke?
Today, no, it was most certainly not a joke. Tomorrow, even still would be a little too soon for it to be a joke. By Wednesday, though, the fact that we had fleas might be hilarious. (So I hope you’re enjoying this post—it’s meant to be funny, as it is now Thursday night and the fleas are hopefully dead and I don’t think I’ve gotten any new bites.)
On Tuesday morning both Bridget and I got up at 6:15, and instead of meeting our friend Jaime to go running like we usually do, took everything out of our room and sprayed it down with the flea spray we’d gotten. (It takes a surprisingly long time to spray three heavy wool blankets with Raid! Flea Killer) Then we both packed up every single item of clothing that we’d brought with us and took it to the Laundromat. Fleas be damned, they were going to die whether they liked it or not.
And here we are, a combined 165 soles worth of laundry later, 3 cans of flea/mite death spray, and 27 soles worth of cortisone cream later, it seems that we are flea free. It is a nice feeling not to wake up in the middle of the night tearing at your legs and arms because they itch so much. And, I suppose because the fleas did not kill us, they perhaps made us stronger. Or at least they made our fingers stronger, from all the itching.

And now, to bed. (which is, thankfully, sans fleas.)