This post is neither informative or educational. Nor will it tug at your heartstrings. Its really just me sharing some comical adventures of Heather in rural Malawi. Last night, we cooked dinner – a fabulous chicken stew topped off with a box of red wine (yes unfortunately, even in rural Malawi, you can get boxed wine and yes unfortunately we sank that low). Like clockwork the electricity went out halfway through the cooking process, but luckily the chefs at Kayesa were nice enough to let us use their open fires to continue the process:
As we were walking to Lauren’s room for our nightly dose of South Park (hey – we all need some mindless comedy at the end of a day full of being stared at, called azungu a million times over, and asked for money by ever child we meet) I felt something biting my legs. I had somehow managed to walk across a line of black army ants marching into Kayesa and they got on my shoes and quickly made their way up my legs. Those suckers can bite! Emily informs me that she watched a documentary on army ants that stated they can kill an elephant if enough of them swarm. I ran into Lauren’s bathroom, stripped down and picked them off of me. Luckily they hadn’t made it past mid-thigh. I then proceeded to spend the next hour or so freaking out and imagining that they were all over me. I imagine that I looked a lot like a heroin addict withdrawing.
Here’s me a bit shell-shocked and still compulsively checking my legs for wayward ants:
It doesn’t end there though – at the end of the night Emily and I went to our respective rooms, only to find the ants had invaded that side of Kayesa – they were everywhere but especially in the bathroom! A huge writhing swarm of them below the sink and a inch think line of them marching down the wall and in front of the shower. I freaked out, we ran out of our rooms, Emily found Mom Anderson on the walk who was coming to warm us that the ants were invading, Sakala came and started sprinkling some white powder everywhere, and Mom started doing the stamp-feet shuffle to keep the ants off her, while swatting my legs with her chitenje and warning me to “take all my clothes off and make sure they don’t get into your hair or soft parts!” I wish the scene had been videotaped – it was so over the top. This regal, stately woman shuffling/stamping/swatting, warning about soft parts, and me shuffling/stamping/swatting and doing the heroin-withdrawal twitch while running to get all my clothes off once again.
The next morning the grass in the courtyard was littered with carnage from the previous night – piles of clothes, rugs, powder everywhere, ant carcasses, and the random vegetables (a cabbage, some onions, and eggplant) I threw out of the pantry in my room thinking the ants were attracted to them:
Here's wikipedia's description of the nasty buggers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_ant
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