แมลงสาบ – The Much Maligned Malaeng

 I see the definition of malign is to speak “spitefully critical” of something. As a tree hugging nature lover, I try hard to find the good in all of God’s creation. However, I ask for allowance to be spiteful and critical of the cockroach.  Malaeng ( แมลง) is the Thai word for most anything without a backbone so covers a wide range of insects, spiders, jelly fish and other critters. Sahp (สาบ) is a word for a musty smell. Put them together and you have Malaeng Sahp, the Thai word for cockroach. It was one of the first vocabulary words we learned in Thai. (Photo is from freeimages.com as we never felt inspired to take our own cockroach photo)

Growing up along the frigid shores of Lake Erie in northern Ohio both Marcia and I were sheltered from cockroaches. I grew up with a swamp for a back yard so we had ants, snakes, mosquitoes, Japanese beetles, fleas, and a variety of mammalian vermin that my parents battled on a daily basis. Cockroaches however, were off the radar. Likewise Marcia would get pretty jumpy with spiders but has no recollection of roaches in her childhood home. The first time I remember encountering a "roach" was as a counselor at church camp. I had led a night hike out to an abandoned cabin on the camp property. Among the swirling flashlight beams I heard a couple campers getting excited about finding a "roach". Looking down expecting to see some kind of bug, there was a marijuana joint! Apparently, some of the neighborhood kids had also found the abandoned cabin. That experience did little to prepare me for the 6 legged roaches in Thailand.

After moving into our first apartment, we soon discovered it was not only ideally situated for our needs, it was also an ideal situation for cockroaches. The apartment was not only on the ground floor, but it backed up to the garbage collection area which was perpetually full. The little critters could feast on the garbage heap then they had free access to our apartment for dessert, rest, recuperation and likely reproduction. Virtually anytime we turned on a light or opened a cupboard or drawer, we could hear the scurrying of not so little feet. We might have accepted it better, except we would wake up with the vile little creatures crawling on us while we slept. That is too much of an invasion of our personal space and I cannot malign them enough.

Every place we lived in Thailand had cock roaches of course, but that apartment took the reward for the most roaches by far of anywhere we lived at any time during our career. But with no prior experience with cock roaches we didn't know how bad it was.

While at the Thai language school, we complained about how many cockroaches we had to a fellow student. She had been in Thailand already for a full 4 year term but hadn't had language school training yet. As a 4 year veteran of Thailand and being ahead of us in language school we had a lot of respect for her viewpoint on things. Whenever we might mention cockroaches in her presence we would get scolded and told don't get excited, get used to it, accept it and move on. We took her advice to heart and didn't mention it much from then on and figured that's just how it is in the tropics.

This person however, also would go to the weekly prayer meetings we had with the other Baptist missionaries in Bangkok. At one of these prayer meetings, we were quietly sitting in a circle listening to the devotion when a cockroach came scuttling across the floor. It skittered right between the feet of our fellow language school student who had advised calm and acceptance. By this time, we didn't get the slightest bit excited and were barely interested in just a single cockroach. We were more accustomed to dealing with dozens at a time in our apartment. Our fellow student and advisor however, looked down, saw the cockroach,  jumped up from her seat, screamed and started stomping her feet wildly. Hmmmm....A veteran's reaction to a cockroach looked a lot like our newbie reaction. Maybe we were already acclimating.