Ant Invasion

I had decided to clean the house today. It was our house made out of brick, the one that used to be the old medical center for La Union but has since been transformed into the first FOR house. It used to be our only house but when the team grew to 3 people in 2004, there wasn’t enough room for them all. For this reason a wooden house was built across the ‘way’ where the shrunken team of 2 now spend most of our time. The brick house does tempt us to spend time in it because of the kitchen within its walls. It also acts as our guest house, not only for our human guests but we have a few bats that use the house as a hangout. Among them, we have a resident rat that has a superfluous amount of food munching on our fruit or tearing into bags and transporting them to places we get to discover much later. Our rat shares its/our food supply with the countless cockroaches and ants that also find shelter in the old medical center. Bats have also found cracks to squeeze into between the roof and the wall (we can always tell they have been there by the poop that is left behind after their evening dinning). And last but not least are our smelliest of them all……massive toads that we don’t often see but that leave most intoxicating tang of feces and urine puddles.

This was the day that I felt the urge to sweep the cement floor as the bat poop and dried mud quickly dirtied the floor. As I was sweeping with the broom I had made out of a dried Iraka leaves (similar to that of a palm leaves), I apparently agitated the ants that had made a home in our wall. It wasn’t until later in the evening when AJ was about to make some dinner, when she entered the kitchen and felt the unfamiliar tickly of dozens of speedy little six legged black ant friends that were madly crawling over her sandled feet and making their way up her bare legs. She moved quickly got out of their range and directed her attention to the massive invasion of black ants that had completely taken over that part of our kitchen. They streamed in through our 4 windows, tracing paths along the wall to our dishes, onto our counters, weaving their way around or over our vegetables, sink and water tank. They covered the counters and floors making all surfaces seem fluid as mini-high ways were created to get them most effectively carry their eggs to their destination.

This being the first time that we were visited by so many ants, we were a bit of a loss of what to do about them and unsure if this was a usual thing that occurred. We went outside and called over two young chaps and asked them if what they could make of this situation. They confidently marched into the kitchen with their gumboots on, and enthusiastically began using our tutume (like a dried calabash that we use to scoop out water from our water tank) to then make an aquatic kitchen by splashing water all over the walls, counters and floor. The slippery concrete was not quite the surface our guests wanted to be trying to find a place to hid their eggs. So over a while they began to disappear and find shelter in the cracks and crevices of our house and of the outdoors.

We thanked the two chaps that were so kind to help us out. They said that this is not something that is unusual, but that they sometimes go into houses and eat your clothes. We were happy to not have them in our rooms, munching away at our clothes and decided it would be better to wait until morning before trying to cook something.