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September 02, 2008

Annoying Insects

This is the season of annoying insects. The rains bring lots of joy and blessing, but also lots of beasties, not unlike the plagues of Egypt:

The "Night Crawlers".
It is almost impossible to do any kind of work by light at night during the rainy season, since any light draws battling hoards of bugs of every size hurling themselves ferociously at your flesh, eyes, and computer screen. The mantis-like monstrosity opposite is an interesting-looking visitor, but when you are trying to read, and it insists on trying to fly into your ear, or crawl inside your shirt, it is distinctly less interesting. One evening I was out and had left my light on by mistake, and came home to find my room swarming with all kinds of interesting bugs. It took about a week to encourage them all to move out.

Blister Beetles.
Nasty little creatures, these. When they bite you – thankfully not very often – the skin swells up in a big blister. There is a liquid inside the blister which burns painfully. And – here’s the wicked bit – if the blister bursts, and the liquid gets onto your skin somewhere else, that also swells up in the same way. I had one in my trousers last year.

Enough said.

Crickets and Locusts.
It’s quite fun watching the chickens in the morning, as they switch and dart after the crickets like a chase scene from Tom and Jerry, looking for – to them and John the Baptist at least – a tasty breakfast. But these crickets and their bodybuilder big brothers, the locusts, are a curse on the land. After three or four months of hard work in the fields, it is devastating to see your fields of millet ravaged by a swarm of these beasts. Year after year, it is like a passage from the Hebrew scriptures – “what the drought left, the birds ate, and what the birds left, the locusts snapped up for elevenses.” Steve has even written a book based around the things.

Mosquitoes.
Worst of all. It’s not enough that they whine in your ears as you are trying to sleep, or that they nibble at any exposed flesh, leaving you scratching furiously for the duration of the rainy season. On top of that, they have to go and inject you with a parasite that kills a million people each year. This last three months, almost daily we hear the hee-haw of the Gorom-Gorom ambulance collecting serious cases of malaria from the villages to bring to hospital. Most of us in Gorom have had less serious cases which we treat ourselves with doses of whatever we can afford. Forget rabid lions, or gorillas with machine guns, the mosquito is probably the most dangerous animal in the world.

You are welcome to come and visit. But you might want to wait until the rains have finished...

Posted by Keith at September 2, 2008 01:00 PM