Night time noises!

Many of you have probably heard of the recent landmine event here in Niamey. For those who haven't, heard here's what happened: One night the first week of January, at about 11pm we heard an explosion. All the neigborhood dogs, ours included, went crazy barking! It turns out someone had set a couple of landmines in the road less than a mile away. And a car had found one of them. While there have been things going on around Niger, this seems to be an isolated incident, and nothing further has happened. We are just cautious when driving on dirt roads late at night/early in the morning. We aren't particularly scared, just a little more careful.

About a week after the landmine incident, we awoke at 2am to a huge bang! We woke out of a dead sleep to feeling our walls vibrate! Our first thought: another landmine! In the morning it became obvious that no one else had heard this mysterious noise. We forgot about it for a couple of days. Until one afternoon when one of the kids needed a band aid. They are kept in the top of the closet in our room, with most first aid supplies, lotions, and other toiletries. As I reached for the plastic shoe box of bandages, I smelled something very strong in the closet. My first thought was that my nail polish remover had spilled on the shelf. I located it- nope, still full. Then I realized that the paint was bubbling up, and peeling off of the bottom of the shelf. Not sure what was going on, I reached to start pulling things out of the closet. I came to the bottom plastic shoebox. Or, I should say, the remaining pieces of it. Apparently a canister of insect repellent had exploded inside it, and blown out the sides and top of the shoebox too! The repellent had then leaked all over the shelf, eating up the paint that was underneath it, and anything else in its path. Thankfully the only real casualties were the shoebox, the bug spray, and a few Curious George bandaids. (Don't worry mom- there are still a few left!=)

So that solved the mystery of the nighttime noise! It also explained why, although it was loud enough to wake us both from a deep sleep (NOT an easy thing to do!), and rattle our walls, no one else had heard it. We heard it so clearly because it was three feet from our bed!
I'm not sure why that particular bottle, which has survived two hot seasons in that very closet, decided on one of the coldest days of the year to explode. It was a comfortable 73 degrees in here! But it gave us a lovely adventure, and hey, it gave me something fun to write about!