'Night 'Night, sleep tight, don't...

‘Night ‘Night, sleep tight, don’t…

One of the more unsavoury aspects of living life close to the streets is the constant battle with bedbugs. A battle not confined to those living in poverty, but one that is made more difficult in poverty.

These dreadful little creatures, while easy to kill, are difficult to get rid of. I won’t go into detailing the habits of bedbugs (just talking about them tends to make people scratch in sympathy), except to mention the effect of their existence on people.

Imagine waking up each morning with a row of intensely itchy bug bites on your arms. You can’t sleep properly at night imagining that you can feel the pests. This insomnia, however slight, makes you feel out-of-sorts. You try to not scratch too much, mindful of possible secondary infection.

When you’ve confirmed the cause of your discomfort, you gather up and bag every item of clothing and bedding and blankets that are in the room and set out to wash and dry every item. No vehicle? Well, you’ll walk to the nearest Laundromat with as much as you can carry. No money? You’ll wash as much as you can afford to wash, keeping the bags tightly sealed in the interim, your belongings then inaccessible.

You stand and survey your room, an inexpensive, OK, cheap, little weekly rental in a worn out building. The mattress… yes, they are probably there, too. If you are lucky enough to live in a building that has one of the few furniture saunas in Vancouver, the problem is taken care of easily and safely with the help of staff. If there isn’t a sauna, the process of contacting staff to engage exterminators begins. You likely lose your room in the interim. You contemplate not saying anything. It’s cold and wet outside, and rooms are hard to find. It might be better to share with the bedbugs…

This is a slice of a bedbug experience for some who live in poverty, and who do not have a supportive team of people who can help, who can be advocates.

I’ll ease your mind in this close… bedbugs and their eggs are easily killed by cold (72 hours in the deepfreeze) or by heat (6 hours in the dry sauna). Laundering, especially with a dry cycle of an hour is also effective. Used with other strategies (an enzyme spray for shoes or diatomaceous earth along baseboards) eradication is possible.