Journal #4: Leinengen

Karibu usiku yangu (Welcome to my nights),

Growing up in the wilds of Northern Ontario taught me a great deal of respect for wild life. Whether a bird flew through the window, a bear pawed through the garbage, squirrels burrowed into the walls or spiders set up shop on the window, I'd always adopted the live-and-let-live approach. Open the windows to let the bird out, bang pots together to scare away the bear, set a live trap for the squirrels and gently put the spider back outside.

In Kenya the visitors are a bit different but my approach has been the same. All the little lizards are welcome to keep scurrying across the ceiling and walls. The cockroaches (I've only seen two) get escorted outside on the gardening trowel. The six inch millipede crawled across the living room and under the couch as I watched in awe. The legs look more like a wave than individual appendages.

Then there was Alfred, the big (one and three quarters inches long) black beetle that lived under my fridge. He'd come out to visit every night as I cooked dinner and once tried to have a face to face chat, but I rebuffed him when he reached my ankle. Then one night he didn't appear. Two days later I noticed his body under the sink. My first Kenyan pet had passed on.

There is an exception to my peaceful nature, the same one as in Northern Ontario: the mosquito. The blood suckers here carry malaria and dengue fever, so I smush them whenever I get the chance.

Last night I encountered a new visitor. As I was gathering cleaning cloths from around the house for laundry, I lifted one to find that the old sock under it was infested with ants. By infested I mean that the sock, which should have been white or at least brown after being used to wipe down the stove, was almost entirely black. I have never seen such a thick covering of ants. I quickly grabbed the whitest corner, ran to the door dropping ants the whole way and flung the sock outside collecting several bites in the process. Back inside I grabbed the fly swatter and finished off the rest of the ants, quite a lengthy process as they are far more robust than your average fly. I then poured some bleach on the area where the ants had been and washed all the cloths in boiling water. Checking back outside I found the sock still covered, but not quite as black, and decided to leave it overnight.

Around midnight I woke up to relieve myself and as I was standing in the dark washroom I thought I felt something crawling up onto the baby toe of my right foot. Then there was something on my left foot. Then there were many somethings on both feet, and they were biting as they made their way up my calves. Had anyone been watching, I'm sure I would have looked cartoonish hoping from one foot to the other, rubbing my ankles together in an effort to get rid of whatever little critters were there. As soon as I could, I abandonned the bathroom, hopped into the living room and turned on the light.

Sure enough, my feet were covered in ants. The light also showed that it wasn't only my feet. There were two streams of ants going into the bathroom and one coming out, several more into the shower cubicle, one just starting into the living room, a small lake on the kitchen floor, and in the middle of the hall I had thankfully not stepped in the Pile: a two inch high, five inch diameter swarm of black movement.

My adrenalin level jumped. There I was, barefoot, without insecticide or even a fly swatter and facing an army of ants as populous as China.

First things first, I wiped the buggers off my legs and gave them a good squashing with my heel, then considered my options. A commando operation in the kitchen would secure me some bleach, while in the still undefended bedroom there was a bottle of Muskol. Not the new aerosolised placebo, but the good old stuff: 95% Deet and recently banned from use by the Canadian Army. With those I might be able to set up a beachhead near the stove long enough to boil water.

I pulled on my sandals and took a twisting leap from the living room to my bedroom, sailing over the Pile. With several well placed squirts of Muskol I halted the enemy's progress into the living room and cleared foot space for the dash to the kitchen. There I found that not an inch of floor space was free of ants, but at least they were less densely packed than elsewhere. I grabbed the bleach and retreated to the living room to pick the newest group out from between my toes. With the bleach I was able to push back several streams and cut off others. The larger, mega-jawed warrior ants were able to cross the bleach pools, but not in large enough numbers to be a serious threat.

The Pile got it's treatment and a few minutes later I was able to see what all the excitement had been about. The ants had been carrying a large, dead cockroach home for a midnight snack.

I spread the bleach pools with my sandals and soon occupied a corner of the kitchen where the ants were on their way up the cupboards, the sink and the fridge after having occupied the stove top. A few were already climbing the kettle, but fortunately the box of matches was still ant-free. I lit the kettle's burner and doused the largest concentration on the stove top with bleach. While I waited for the water to boil I moved any food that wasn't tightly sealed into the living room. The ants had, thankfully, not climbed high enough to reach any of it yet.

A few minutes later the water was bubbling and my live-and-let-live policy was a distant memory. Literal waves of ants were washed to the floor from the cupboards, the fridge, the sink, the stove, the shower, the door frame, the dishes, the window sill and the wall. It took four kettles and some determined searching to finally root out all the invaders.

During the search I had noticed that the outside sill of the kitchen window seemed to be an insectoidal superhighway, fortunately running the length of the sill rather than from the outside in. I carried the fifth kettle outside and found the largest concentration yet running up into a crack in the wall. I doused them, as well as several mini-Piles on the ground outside, getting quite a few bites in the process.

Under the mini-Piles I discovered what had prompted the frenzied invasion. My neighbours had thrown out some ugali (corn meal) and the ants had claimed it as their own.

It took two hours from start to finish, but I had finally mopped up all patches of resistance. I wiped the ant bits from the soles of my feet and dropped into bed knackered. I'd take a snow storm over this any day.

I couldn't sleep. My adrenaline was still pumping (and still is as I write this email). No amount of abdominal breathing seemed to slow it down. Despite the air temperature of fifteen my racing metabolism was keeping my body temperature so high that even pulling a sheet over me started a sweat.

And then there was the little haunting thought in the back of my mind: where did they come from? And what if there are more? Had I won the battle only to wake up the next morning having lost the war? I decided not to wait for the dawn and set my alarm for 4:30am.

Even that didn't bring peace of mind. Every time I closed my eyes I saw little, black, scurrying shapes. Every time I lay still for a few seconds I'd feel a phantom ant crawling up my leg. No matter what I tried to think about my thoughts returned resolutely to the ants.

I was still awake when the alarm went off at 4:30am. Sitting up cautiously under my mosquito net, I turned on my flashlight and surveyed the bedroom floor. It looked clear. I slipped into my sandals, crossed the room and turned on the light. So far so good. The hall, shower cubicle and bathroom were clear except for some bodies.

In the kitchen I confronted the scale of the earlier battle. The floor was covered in dead ants. They were piled where the waves of boiling water had pushed them together, and more spread out where they had floated apart. A faint smell of bleach still lingered, but nothing moved.

At last I was calm enough to sleep. I forgot to reset my alarm and was almost late for work, throwing breakfast in my back pack on the way out the door.

Jaqueline and Bob commiserated with me and shared some tricks (sprinkling paraffin or watered down dish detergent) and some stories (ants falling from the ceiling like rain, pots of food turned black by the colony's onslaught). And then they gave me the news I didn't want to hear: when the rains start later this month, the ants will only get worse.

Lala salama (Sleep peacefully),
Yaacov

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