Creature comforts

Foreword: This post was written a month ago but was delayed in posting.

Insects. They come and come, and always seem to go for the face. Remember all the commercials for sponsoring Africa orphans? The flies are actually like that sometimes. Biking uphill, with a fly persistently trying to land on your face is slow torture, and it happens, a lot.

There are 3 different creatures that have been continuously annoying me lately. Wasps, termites, and worms.

Since the rains are slowly coming to an end I suddenly remember “Oh yeah, termites love eating my fence and house.” How could I have forgotten? Last year my back door was on its last leg after termites ate all the border wood and started on the main body of the door. It was a daily bug spray and sweeping battle. Just today I discovered they are trying to eat my window and their trail leads somewhere into my walls. It’s just cement and dirt in there so i don’t really know what they would be doing but after seeing damage other volunteers have experienced, I know trouble must be brewing in there. Last week I spent 6 hours with another volunteer rebuilding my privacy fence in my back yard and just a couple days later I found the spiky mud of termite infiltration. It’s a losing battle I feel.

Wasps love me. I love killing them. It’s not just wasps but all flying stinging creatures. I was stung by a hornet (and honestly, I can’t really tell the difference between wasps and hornet so I might use the phrase interchangeably) last month. It got me in the back of the shoulder before cowardly running off into my Mango tree. A week later I got stung twice on the thumb as I tried to close my back door. How was I supposed to know some little red and yellow wasps had moved in? Man, it hurt so badly. My whole thumb swelled up and in a culture that loves to shake your hand, it was a problem. At any given time my backyard has something with a stinger in flight. Doing laundry never fails to be a time of ducking and weaving to avoid these guys. Today, as I was sitting innocently washing clothes in my backyard I felt an itch on my back. Doing laundry outside always includes little bugs biting me or something landing on me and causing an itch. When I went to brush my back I managed to roll something far bigger than a fly across my back. It instantly hurt on my hand and back and I thought “geeze! That hurt, it kinda felt like a wasps sting, man!”. When I looked at the ground what did I see but a little yellow and red wasp. I killed it but that thing managed to sting both my hand and back. I kill them in my house daily.

The last but surely not least is the parasite I had. About 3 months ago I noticed an itching on the side of my foot. I had a red bump so I figured it might have been a mosquito bite. A week later it was still there. I thought “well, i guess a mosquito got me twice”. Mosquitos love feet. I ended up waiting. PC people are covered in rashes all the time. Bumps and itches come and go. I wasn’t worried. A month and a half went by. I started to forget how long I had had it. 2 weeks? 5 weeks? I finally called the med unit. Over the phone saying “My foot itches....” of course just sounds like a fungus. I put cream on it and noticed that the itch started to be in a different area. In a week it had moved about an inch. When I say “move” I don’t mean I could see it moving, it moved slowly, sometimes painfully at a crawl. So, called the med unit again. “I have a moving itch that has travelled an inch towards my toe...” sound like a worm. By the time I got a cream for it the worm had moved about 2 inches. I put that on and about a week later it was dead. I had imagined I would go to Kombo for some toe cutting worm removal thing. It was less exciting. Worms in real life aren’t like the show Monsters Inside Me, at least not for me, yet.