Bugs

I have been talking about the rains so much lately. Maybe it's because they seem so fascinating, being remnants of the monsoons I have heard of all my life. It also could be that since I am working with farmers, I may be growing affectionate them as the source of their livelihood. Who knows?

I have finally, however, found my first "bone to pick" with the rains. Bugs ... I hate bugs.

Some bugs breed in the puddles and ponds. Some are forced out of their undergound havens when they fill up with water. Some are attracted by the population explosion of other, more edible, bugs. In any case, the rains have outed them and the bright lights of the compound have led them to me.

It began one night, when I "woke" to a tickle on my inner thigh. Typically this sensation is the work of an ant or a housefly, so I barely bothered to attempt consciousness as I slapped the annoying offender. My entire palm made contact with a spindly mass, flailing against the advance. Had I realized in time, I may have changed my slap to a less destructive flick and avoided disaster. I didn't, though, and the resulting smoosh was epic.

I nearly cried. Now fully aware, I had heard the splash and felt the slimey moisture cover my skin. I aimed my flashlight at the spot, hesitated, then flicked it on. There pasted to my leg was what I can only describe as a daddy-long-legs suffering from elephantitis of the everything. The beast alone would have been gross enough, but unfortunately the egg sack it had been carrying brought me to the edge of vomiting. I cleaned myself off, crawled back in bed, and hoped that this would be an isolated incident.

While that experience remains the most traumatic of my bug-related stories, I actually had to ask my host father to kill one particular wall-spider last night. It was a fast-moving thing, bigger than the last, but significantly more armoured. Its legs were thick and angled forward, and its back reminded me of a beetle. I asked him to do it because it was tinted red, and something in the back of my head tells me colours mean poison. I don't know if this one counts, but I didn't want to chance it. Anyway, despite having taken several blows from a flip-flop, I have reason to believe it is still alive. When I woke this morning, it was perched above my bed - three legs fewer than what it had had the night before. I think it was planning something.

My war with the bugs is not just limited to spiders, though. They have banded together, all over them. Shifting their tactics to more subtle advances, coming smaller and in great numbers. Their spies are everywhere. I even have to purge my clothes of them in the morning before I put them on.

Some are relatively harmless. I could almost get used to them. The grasshoppers climb the walls, comedically jumping out at me from random places. The hit me in the face. They bounce around inside my skirt. They particularly like to land on me when I'm changing or bathing, maximizing the grossed-outedness of the experience.

The beetles and bugs of that sort just crawl around being interesting, though. Some are dark and huge, I imagine they are dung beetles, but I don't know. Others are tiny, failing in their attempt at camouflage ask they crawl across my curtains. The cream-coloured satin providing little refuge for the many dressed as leaves or rocks.

Less harmless are the mosquitos and moth-like things, and finally the fleas. At least I think they're fleas. They're tiny and white, they jump, and I believe they only come in packs of millions. The only thing is that they don't seem to bite - or at least if they do I don't notice. They just jump on me like I'm some sort of giant person-shaped bouncy castle.

The jerks are the only ones who have made it past my mosquito net, invading what I thought was my permethrin-treated fortress of solitude. Maybe they were in the bed when I came, or maybe I carried them in from somewhere else, but however it happened, I have been overtaken. This never happened to superman ...

I couldn't even send a text message last night! Every time the backlight of the phone came on it seems to stir them to rebellion! They would leap to my screen, and though I tried to squish them all it was like playing a level 10592 game of whack-a-mole.

In the end I settled for closing my eyes, lying very still. Either they fell asleep, stopped noticing me, or I stopped noticing them.