Bugs, Leaks and Frog Songs

Porch bug bodies

House bug bodies

Today has been an interesting Sunday at Hekima Place.

There is one thing to be said about the dry season - before it started raining there were no bugs worth mentioning except ants and flies and the occasional large beetle on the porch in the morning - if any survived being eaten by the Pied Ravens overnight (remember the guys with the, take your pick, French maid’s or chef’s aprons?). Well, now it’s the rainy season and with the rains have come big flying termites and myriad tiny beetles. For security reasons at Hekima we leave the porch lights on all night at all the houses. The lights attract both the flying termites and the tiny beetles. Every morning for the past week or so we’ve been waking up to a porch littered with bug bodies - both mostly dead ones and some partly alive ones. I don’t know if the termites die, but they do lose their wings in the course of the night and in the morning, we find drifts of termite wings piled in corners where the wind has blown them. The tiny beetles just die. They must hatch out somewhere, make their flight to the porch lights, breed (presumably they get to have a bit of fun in their one day of life) and die. It’s bad enough that the beetles pile up on the porch, but somehow, even with the windows and doors closed and locked, large numbers of them find their way inside. I took a picture of the porch this morning before we swept all the beetle bodies off of it - as we’ve been doing every morning recently. I took another picture of the disgusting little pile of creatures that I swept up from inside the guest house!

It’s bad enough to wake up to all these beetle bodies all over the floor, but it turns out that they are an ant’s favorite breakfast snack! So if you don’t get the beetles out of the house fast, you very quickly have squirming mounds of ants feeding upon each and every tasty little beetle body. As if it weren’t hard enough to keep the ants under control when there aren’t beetle body dining delicacies everywhere!

It rained hard yesterday. So hard that Amani House (the office) had water leaking in from the roof and down the front wall. Today it rained hard again and Amani took on more water, from the roof down the front wall and also from the peak of the roof down the wall in the kitchenette. Sophie and I both had a turn mopping up the water. In addition, the gutter on the back of Amani house pulled loose with the load. This after the gutter on one of the other houses came off two weeks ago in a rain storm. Mild mannered Sophie (our accountant) was furious, so, even though it is Sunday, she phoned the builder to tell him how not thrilled she was with his team’s handiwork. Don’t know exactly what she said, but the builder promised he would have his butt here bright and early tomorrow morning.

One lovely rainy season thing - there is a rising chorus of frog voices outside tonight. Bases, sopranos, and everything in between croaking out a variety of tunes. I wonder how many frog species are out there singing their little hearts out. They really enliven the African night soundscape. I should do a movie - not that you’d see anything since they shut up if you approach them - but just for the sound. It’s wonderful.

They don’t tell you about this stuff in the glossy travel brochures. Of course, the glossy travel brochures don’t usually encourage you to visit during the rainy season, either.