If you hate bugs, don't read this...
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Wednesday January 16, 2008
File under: People & Places
The other day I received an email from my brother in Kenya. It was a relief to read about something other than the political unrest in that country, but what he wrote filled my mind with horrific images.
You see, I am not very fond of bugs, and the situation he described had my skin crawling. As you read this, perhaps you will appreciate how different life can be in another part of the world. I've presented the essential text of his email with only slight modifications.
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Last night Noelle started noticing all these spiders crawling around in the school room after dinner. We had problems before with spider broods hatching in our house and then having to kill hundreds of spiders, so we thought it was the same thing. We had the kids running around with tissues killing dozens of them. Judah especially got a kick out of this exercise. :-) Then, they started noticing dozens of ants in the other end of the room. I also noticed that the spiders seemed to all be pouring in from the crack under the back door. I realized something strange was going on outside, so I got a flashlight and a couple of cans of Doom (like Raid) and went to the
backyard to investigate.
There were dozens of these huge black circles on our backyard that, in the dark, looked like dirt patches in our lawn. On closer inspection I realized that they were huge ant piles with thousands of ants crawling on top of each other. They were all connected by these thick highways of ants in this amazing network. I then looked up at the walls of our house and realized that there were hundreds of crickets, roaches, and spiders all climbing along the back walls of our house, trying to get away from these ants. Some of them had found cracks in our windows and doors and were pouring in through them. I'm not sure if this was some kind of a coordinated "hunt" that the ants were doing, but it sure seemed like the other insects interpreted it that way.
I had to be really careful because if I accidentally stepped into one of those ant piles or highways, I could have hundreds of biting ants up my leg in seconds. (I know this from painful experience.)
Carefully avoiding the ants, I began to spray a heavy perimeter of Doom around all our windows and doors, killing many ants and other insects along the way. By the time I got to our back porch where all the spiders were entering I found spiders and other bugs everywhere--it was a like a big sanctuary for them. I began to just spray a fog of Doom everywhere indiscriminately, and then seconds later I heard what basically sounded like rain--but it was hundreds of bugs falling off the walls and ceiling of our porch onto the floor. It was a really sickening sound.
I started choking and gagging on the Doom and then went back into the house and then sealed the entire backdoor with duct tape so that more spiders couldn't enter. After that, things calmed down for the rest of the night. There are these huge ant colonies all over our station and when they decide to mobilize it really is like something out of National Geographic. We've had some other interesting wonders related to insects like witnessing the migration of tens of thousands of butterflies and seeing hundreds of thousands of termites hatch and take to the skies to form new colonies. One of the fringe benefits of living in Africa.
Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of last nights events. :-( Maybe next time, but it's usually such a hectic scene that it's hard to think about taking pictures during the actual attack. Hope that gave you something entertaining to read with your morning coffee. :-)
Steve
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