Niguas / Shichas

(The following was written by my youngest daughter Jayde.
Let me just warn you that she is quite the character!)

Shichas. They are horrible little creatures, and I haven't the faintest idea why God invented them but He must have had a reason.

These little shichas were little tiny flea-like bugs that lived in dirt and would climb into your foot and make a nest of baby shichas IN YOUR FOOT. The only way to get rid of one, was to poke it out with a needle. This, as you can probably imagine, hurt. And the fact that I ran around bare-foot, made me come home with little nature presents in my feet nearly every day.

Mom was the shicha remover. She was the mom, thus, she had needles and therefore, was the one who dealt with the problem. She would await us in the room, like she wasn't happy to have the privilege of holding our jungle feet and picking disgusting shichas out of our foot. What an honor! I can't imagine why she wouldn't be thrilled...

It would start with HER. Spotting us limping as casually as we could manage, (which wasn't very discreet.) The shichas ITCHED LIKE YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE while they were in your foot. They squirmed around and built nests all inside your foot. So, trying to walk in a casual manner was NOT as easy as it may sound.

We weren't overjoyed to have someone pick at our feet. It hurt and tickled at the same time, if you can imagine that. Dad was the funniest whenever he had a shicha in his foot. It was family-time. We'd all gather around as Mom prepared the foot. She would place it on her lap, needle in hand, and one of us kids holding the Somergan lotion. Somergan would kill the little devil, hiding in our foot. Mostly what mom would do was poke a big hole and DOUSE the fellow with Somergan.

Dad would sit there. Holding on to something. Usually he clutched the chair so hard that we all feared it might fall apart.
"Ready?" Mom would ask.
"Uh-huh..."
"OOkaay.." And with that, she could pierce the needle into my Dad's foot and--
"YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! OUCH OUCH OUCH!" He would yelp, and he would move, and Mom had to point out that if he moved again, it would hurt him even more.

Dad sat still for maybe two more minutes as Mom poked and prodded around in his foot. If he had a nest in his foot this process could take hours. We would beg Mom to leave it alive.

We kids were evil to them. Once we took them out, we'd steal Mom's needle, the Somergan, the matches and begin the torture. We hated shichas. They made us look like idiots for scratching our feet during Sunday service. It was FINE if the Indians did it, but if we did it, Mom would take us out of church and home and then pick it out and we'd go back to church feeling relieved.

One night, we had an experiment. We wanted to see just how tough Demon, (that's what we named it) was. We filled a cup with water. He swam around. He was smaller than a flea. Then he JUMPED out of the cup and we dashed for him. We didn't want to kill it, because we weren't done playing with it yet. Josh finally caught him, digging into our cat's tail. The cat took care of it, and then my brother Josh pried it away from Maxine. He held it in a napkin.

Next we burned it. Over the gas stove, we speared it with the needle and roasted him like a marshmallow. Only...we didn't eat it.

We tried soaking it in a bowl of Somergan, and we tried to flush it down the toilet. The toilet worked, and we had to go to bed.

The next day, someone, I won't say who, used the restroom and ...well...we'll leave it at that.

We enjoyed shichas. Part of life. And we dealt with them appropriately and enthusiastically!