“Oooooo, Dona!” Mrs. G calls as she hurries along the path to our hut from the central plaza.

“Oooooo, Dona!” she cries again, announcing herself as she approaches our door on the perimeter of the village. Bowed legs wobble beneath a protruding belly from her diet of starchy manioc tubers. The wife of a village elder, a lifetime of brutal heat and sun has browned her wrinkled face making it hard to guess her age. She calls me “Dona” in Portuguese as a term of respect, meaning “Madam”.

We’re in the tropical forest south of the Amazon River in central Brazil. My husband Bem and I are living among the indigenous Bororo people, doing anthropological research. We finish our cold breakfast of leftover rice from yesterday’s dinner just as Mrs. G arrives. I jump up to meet her outside.

“Dona, Dona! There’s something in my ear. I can feel it moving.”

In the dim morning haze, I squint through her hair, trying to peek into the canal. “How can something have gotten into your ear?”

“It must have crawled in while I was sleeping. I think it’s a cockroach.”

Of the many nasty insects we battle daily in the tropics, a measly cockroach seems the least likely candidate to take up residence in her ear.

“I can’t see anything. Let’s go inside. I’ll get a flashlight.”

Mrs. G paces in front of our hearth, moaning impatiently while I search for a light. “Dona, Dona, get it out!”

“Sit here and put your head down on the table. You’ll have to hold still,” I beg.

The double desk and bench are attached as one. It’s the only seat and flat surface we have in our little shack, and we use it for everything: eating, writing, and examining ears while looking for cockroaches. We borrowed it from the unused schoolhouse that the missionaries built with great hope many years ago.

But Mrs. G can’t stop moving. “Get it out! Get it out!” She wails.

I never intended to be the village quack doctor. But shortly after we arrived one of our neighbors fell into the coals of her fire pit, the result of a dispute with her inebriated husband. She came to me for help and I treated her wounds with burn cream from my small medical kit. After that, villagers came by almost daily for treatment for cuts, fever, and now perhaps, extraction of a cockroach. Mostly the Bororo treat themselves using a fish hook to dig out thorns or herbs to relieve colds and diarrhea. One windy day in the dry season something flew into my eye. I rinsed the socket with water but couldn’t get the darn thing out. After rubbing it all night my eye looked ugly and swollen in the morning when I joined the women for coffee at the communal fire. My friend Maria Aroe noticed my discomfort.

“Dona, what’s wrong with your eye?”

“There’s something in it that I can’t seem to get out.”

She stood and walked around the fire, reaching her arms out to me. I got up to meet her, leaning in with eyes wide so she could take a closer look. Only instead of looking she grabbed my head, surrounded my eye with her toothless mouth and began sucking on my eyeball. Her warm, slack lips covered half my face while a syrupy tongue circled beneath my eyelids, probing every corner for the offending particle. In horror, I tried to pull away, but Maria Aroe is twice my size and strength, and I didn’t stand a chance of loosening her grip. Not until she felt satisfied that she’d done a thorough job did she release my head and I staggered back, groping for my skirt to wipe at the saliva running down my cheek. Blinking in disbelief, I took a moment to consider how my eye felt. Whether because she’d actually gotten something out, or because I wasn’t willing to risk another attempt, my eye miraculously felt better.

Mrs. G continues pacing back and forth, holding her ear and crying. “It hurts, Dona! Get it out!”

“Please lay your head down so I can see what’s in there,” I say, and she finally settles onto the bench. Sure enough, the flashlight reveals the rear end of a cockroach. Not one of those little brown things under the kitchen sink, this bugger resembles a Florida Palmetto: big, red, scaly, and completely filling her ear canal.

Bem brings a pair of tweezers.

“You’ll have to hold still,” I tell Mrs. G, and Bem helps by pressing her head against the desk while I lean against her body. Mrs. G is short but she outweighs me by 50 pounds. This isn’t going to be easy I council myself as I reach for the creature’s rear end and pull.

“Ahhhhhh! Dona! It’s moving!” Her hysteria is now fueled by the beast digging its barbed legs into her ear canal in order to hold on. I can see that doing battle this way is not a war I can win, so I go in search of rubbing alcohol.

“This will be cold but it’ll kill the cockroach,” I explain, pouring the liquid into her ear.

“Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh!”

I’m surprised when no one from the village comes running to see what murder is taking place, though it’s only the demise of a cockroach. Mrs. G keeps screaming as the roach keeps wiggling and Bem keeps pressing her head onto the desk so the alcohol wouldn’t run out and I keep pouring more into her ear until finally after several minutes of battle the monster twitches for the last time. We have prevailed. Dripping with sweat and exhausted from combat we breathe a collective sigh of relief. Bem releases Mrs. G and she sits up, tilting her head to drain the alcohol onto a rag where we expect to see the roach fall out. It doesn’t.

“Oooooo, Dona! It’s still in there!”

Bem holds her head down and once again I grab the bug’s rear with tweezers and pull. The insect, however, even in death, refuses to cooperate. All that emerges is the butt, followed by a leg. I tear a sheet of paper from a nearby notebook and lay it on the desk. Mrs. G whimpers and squirms while sweat drips from my hair and soaks through my shirt. Using just the right amount of pressure on the tweezer to grab each body part without squishing and losing it in her ear, I remove bit after bit of the cockroach and reassemble its body on the white surface. With a surgeon’s precision, I account for each section of carapace: six legs, two wings, two antennae, and the head.

Twenty minutes later we’re finally done. Mrs. G sits up and for the first time since she entered our hut, she isn’t howling. She looks at the pieced-together insect on the paper, nodding her head thoughtfully and rubbing her now empty ear. Moving stiffly she rises from the bench, tired from her ordeal, and maneuvers her bulk around the side of the desk. Slowly she walks toward the door, then stops to turn and look at me.

“I TOLD you there was a cockroach in my ear!” she shouts and leaves.

– Bela Fabian