It's All Fun & Games Until Someone Has to Suck the Poison Out.

Dawn won't let me kill spiders in our room when we go to Africa.



Let me back up a minute and set the stage. First, yes: Dawn and I are roommates during our PEACE trip to Sierra Leone. (Am I excited?, you ask. My pee-my-pants-due-to-happiness meter is off the charts.) And you'd think, naturally, that we would have planned that, but no; it was random. (Or, divinely inspired if you want to look at it like that.)



The next piece necessary to display on this story's stage is the fact that Dawn is a vegetarian and massive animal lover. (She doesn't only love animals massive in size. And Dawn herself is not massive. It's her love for animals that earns that particular size description. And as a side note, over-clarification makes me feel all warm and secure inside.) Because of this, Dawn doesn't condone the killing of any animal when it's unwarranted, and to use her words, she "chooses compassion over cruelty" every time. This is just one of the many things I admire about Dawn. Admire, not agree with.



My thoughts on the matter are, I absolutely agree with not killing when it comes to all those beautiful animals or animals that remind me of dogs. (Sorry - you can't call me superficial if I already called myself that first.) For instance, hunting, killing for the pure "sport" (ego boosting) of it, makes no sense to me. "Wow! That's an enormous elk head you have over your hearth! I guess I never heard about the time you were lost in the wild with no food and then had to resort to killing an animal in order to survive! Oh. That wasn't what happened? You just shot the elk because you could? Was it a war of the minds? Oh. Elk don't have the intelligence level of a human? Ohhhhh, but you got a TROPHY for killing it? Well then, please, carry on. You just go right ahead and keep adding majestic animal heads to your home decor!"

But, there are certain animals (snakes, spiders, anything unpredictable and much too quick) that are so horrendous looking and that have B-movie horror films made of them, that we should all just be a little more understanding toward each other when one of us (me) kills something as freakishly scary as a spider that's large enough to EAT A BIRD! (It's true, Dawn. They exist.) Dawn's technique is to tenderly scoop up a spider on a piece of paper and gently shoo it out into nature. How very idyllic. She's like the Jane Goodall of arachnids.




And since Dawn has seen me kill a few spiders with as much blunt force trauma as what you would usually reserve for cracking a coconut, she knows my feelings about spiders being in my territory. (Or, large cockroaches. Scampering out from behind my office phone. It happened.) And as we've been warned about the possibility of creatures foreign to us showing up uninvited in our rooms in Sierra Leone, I've already told Dawn that cruelty (survival, in my opinion) will most likely wreck compassion when it comes to my "creeped out" level.

So, stay tuned to find out how many times the two of us will be forced to have a little conflict resolution while in Africa based on the number of times I bring a violent death to any and all spiders, snakes, crawling things, etc.

All I know is I, for one, will sleep a lot better.

Just, Michelle