Personal Voice

When I lived in New York, I worked in some very rundown parts of the big cities, and at times I came across literally thousands of cockroaches. In one home, I worked with a family that was struggling with many issues. Both parents had lost their jobs, and the family had health problems. I was working with them to assess what could be done to make their lives better.

Late one evening, while I was visiting there, the power suddenly went out. They thought it might be because they hadn’t paid the power bill for a while. We especially thought this was the situation because we could see lights on in all the surrounding homes.

However, upon further inspection, we realized that it was nothing but a blown fuse in the electric box, possibly caused by old wiring and too many electrical devices being used on the same circuit. I knew the house’s age and suggested to the husband, Allen, that we check the control panel before contacting the power company.

With a dying flashlight in hand, he led me to the fuse box. This was not a modern breaker box, but a box with oversized round glass fuses like the ones I remembered from when I was young. Upon inspecting the fuses, we found that one of the main ones was blown. It was completely black. Allen said he was sure he had a replacement.

While everyone else sat in light lit by a single, small, flickering candle, Allen and I took the dim flashlight and looked for the fuse. We went through all sorts of drawers and finally found it. We carefully pulled out the old fuse and screwed in the new one. The instant the lights came on, the living room floor looked like it was alive.

When the light flooded the room, the whole floor was covered in cockroaches, about as close together as they could fit. There were literally thousands of them. Their mad dash to hiding places made the floor look like it was being sucked into the walls. The only ones left on the floor were the ones Allen and I had stepped on as we were going about the task of searching for and changing the fuse. I had thought the crunching under my feet was the sound of the floorboards of their old house. I didn’t realize I was stepping on cockroaches.

But cockroaches are amazing creatures. Even the ones that we had stepped on were still alive, though wounded. They, too, hurried to the dark abyss of their hideaways, just more at a limp than a scamper.

As many cockroaches as there were at that house, I was amazed they didn’t just pick it up and carry it away. I saw a video where the Amish people picked up a barn, standing shoulder to shoulder, and carried the whole barn to a new place. It wasn’t a small barn, either. I could imagine something like that with the cockroaches. But I digress.

To help the family, we decided the first thing to do was to get rid of the cockroaches. We started by cleaning every nook and cranny of the house. Every time we moved a piece of furniture, there was a mad exodus of cockroaches to their dark hideaways. This was especially true in the kitchen, where hundreds were behind the stove alone. We got rid of all we could and cleaned everything.

Throughout the process, we often wondered if we were making any progress. We would check it out by turning off the lights for a while and then turning them back on. We didn’t appear to have made a dent in the critter count. We decided they must be in the crawl space. With a donation from the church we attended, we asked for bids from some exterminators. But each time they came and went into the crawl space, they came out ashen-faced and never gave us a bid.

I glanced in there with a flashlight, and the whole place seemed to be crawling. Maybe that’s why they call it a crawl space. We finally got an exterminator to do the job at a high price. We got the house comfortable and clean. In fact, we made it so nice that the owner raised the rent so high that Allen’s family had to move.