The Insect Experience

Topics: If I had to describe Africa to you in one word, I would say hot. I know what you are thinking. It's the end of winter here, Jory. Winter come March is like living in the stix of the Gobi. More than once you’ve considered rigging a high-powered hair dryer up to heavy duty extension cord and spending hours outside gleefully melting away piles of snow with malicious delight. You’re thinking that you’d give anything for it to be hot outside. You’ve weighed the pros and cons of hot and cold and you think you understand what I’m talking about. No you don’t.

You don’t know what it is like to go to bed every night sweating and wake up (what a surprise!) still sweating. Then walk to your door and, go figure, sweat some more. It is so blazing hot that you don’t even need to be in the sun to bleed water out of your pours. Sitting in the shade is enough to make you sweat buckets. This is the kind of world where you welcome cold showers like a kid on Christmas morning. I have taken to drinking about six litres of water per day just so I stop sweating my own body weight away under the racing rays of a workaholic sun. I’m not talking about having a healthy habit—I’m talking about metamorphosis. In the last three weeks I have become part camel. I am always hot. And whenever I tell any of my kids that I’m dying of heat, they laugh at me as though I’m some sort of drama queen. The thing is, I’m not being dramatic. I hate the heat the way some people hate the mosquitoes here. I’d take a hike in the mosquito population over 100 degree weather any day. In fact, I’ve thought of climbing to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro just to cool off.

Topic Two: Wildlife. My life is a safari of insects. Yesterday I showered with a gecko, four spiders and an army of mosquitoes. A week ago I opened the door to my room and found a millipede trucking its way across the floor like there was a designated insect crossing right down the middle. And at night there is a mammoth species of spider that haunts the walkways and paths of the base. One memorable night here, I was sitting on a bench outside my room and I had my first encounter with the first native mastodon. It was so large that at first we thought it might be a slightly underweight scorpion. At the mention of scorpions I forgot all about the spider when a visiting missionary decided to regale me with tales of how, the last time he was at the base, he fried a scorpion and ate it.

Forget for one moment that he ate a scorpion and the fact that there is a new species of elephant in front of us. I was still stuck on ‘scorpion.’ All week I had been keeping my running shoes outside our door, oblivious to the fact that any wily scorpion could have seen my blue and brown Nikes and thought, “Hmm, there’s a great place to go play dead” until I unknowingly slipped my foot inside and disturbed its dreamless slumber. This was no genie in a bottle and there aren’t three wishes at the end of the rainbow. This is how you lose a toe.

If scorpions in your shoes doesn’t strike fear into your heart, you haven’t met the choo event yet. That’s right, the choo. Choo is a Swahili word for lou, which here at the base pretty much consists of a designated hole in the ground. There is nothing quite like walking into the choo, pulling down your britches and watching an army of mosquitoes swarm to your naked bottom while you go. Were it any other position besides squatting, you might have a prayer of knowing if you are serving Christmas come early to the mob of savage insects. With all the bugs you see, it is no wonder that the frog population is so shockingly high here. When I got here I thought that the base was just the amphibian mothership, but have since discovered that the reason for the frog metropolis is due to the desperate need of water in the Kilimanjaro region right now. Either that or this is God’s holding ground for the next plague of frogs to beset the world.

As long as we’re talking about the choo, the only thing more daunting than going to the choo is taking a shower. The standing water in the bottom of the pipe makes it a veritable breeding ground for malaria-bearing mosquitoes, which hover above the stall until the moment you’ve stripped your clothes off and then, as if on cue, a fleet of insect kamikazes come diving down the walls like little suicide bombers. In that moment you are keenly aware that you only have two hands to ward off a small town of bugs now aimed at your flesh, and suddenly you find yourself thinking that the life of an invertebrate never looked better. Octopuses have all the luck.

Topic three: Blood types. I am B positive (+), hallelujah Gawd. In preparing to come I knew to expect few things besides bad mosquitoes. To many of the foreigners crossing the Tanzanian border, they are. I, however, am not among the members of the International Bureau of Organized Terrorism against Mosquitoes, an ordered vendetta against the state bird of Alaska.

Why? I wonder if it has something to do with B+ because they simply don’t bite me. I have actually systematically researched this event of mosquito attacks whilst five or six of us sit on a bench in the bloom of evening. A mosquito will dance around my ears bleating the war cry all humans dread, perch down once or twice on my unsuspecting arm or ankle but then, for no apparent reason, move onto the next person without so much as a lovebite. This same mosquito will then make an emergency landing on any of the next vulnerable victims down the bench and immediately begin sucking their blood. Statistically I have received the smallest number of bites in history for any person in Tanzania, crossing the border into my second bite only yesterday after nearly four weeks of being here. Some of my friends would decapitate me for saying this. One fellow foreigner here, a delightful girl from Germany, is among the higher ranking officials of the IBOTM. A warm and inviting person in general, Svenja’s entire mien changes when you bring up the topic of mosquitoes. At night she takes aerosol cans of bug spray into the students’ dorm room to “destroy the mosquito parties,” as she calls them. Later at night when she is trying to sleep, the mosquitoes seek their revenge by running the gauntlet outside her mosquito net. In the morning she comes out of the room with dark circles under her eyes, saying that between the natives’ talking and the mosquitoes’ flying she lost all her sleep for the night. Of course, she never has any dark circles under her eyes. We just tease her that she must have good blood.

Topic four: Luck. If luck comes from stars, I’ve got good ones. Luck is my only alternative explanation for my undefeated record of mosquito evasion. To my brothers’ chagrin I seem to be the luckiest person on the face of the planet, so much so that for my 18^th birthday my family actually encouraged me to go to the casino to pay my way through college. In six years of rather atrociously breaking the speed limit on a regular basis, I have yet to receive a speeding ticket. (Knock on wood). And one late night of watching Noah’s ark walk by the little row of us sitting using our computers by the open field, I moved off to bed thinking it was time to go before I saw a snake. Sure enough, minutes after I left a little sidewinder came down the wall next to the bench. That’s some darn good luck. But then, I think the idea of luck is somewhat of a ruse, anyhow. I don’t really believe in luck. I do believe in God and that God has a rather obvious sense of humor. Just think about the contortions of people’s faces as they chew their food. Mealtimes will never be the same.