Man's Best Friend

You may think that this is going to be a discussion of the differences in the treatment of animals between the States and Cameroon, but you would be wrong.

This is about critters.

I have recently been going through this "everything deserves to live and has a place in the CIRCLE OF LIFE AND IT MOVES US ALL" phase. I can tell you now that it's over. Maybe it's that it doesn't really work in Africa.

Right now, my skin is a battlefield. Picture WWI. Mustard gas. Barbed wire. Pus. Blood. The dead and dying. (I may be taking this a little far, when I don't have my camera to upload the poorly lit and fuzzily frightening picture I took of my ankle last night)

There are these things called moute-moutes and they might look like slightly-bigger gnats, but they are not. Darwin would love them. They eat everything - bananas, pineapples and especially me. When they bite you, it stings a little and you look down and there's a spot of blood on your ankle, hand, elbow, foot, whatever. Then you know that you have a giant raised red itchy bug bite with a liquid filled raised head that sometimes gets bigger than a pencil eraser.

There are also of course mosquitos and ants.

And then yesterday, I found out about blister beetles. This is not something I pulled from Harry Potter. They are real. They land on you and inject ACID into your skin, which then peels up like you have been BURNED BY ACID, because you have. I think I might have gotten one.

Right now, there's a mark a little smaller than a deck of cards on my leg that is a really angry red color and is fevery and now my ankle is swelling...just after I got over have swollen ankles and feet from the heat.

Also, last night went to the bathroom. Dropped trou and got ready to do my business and a massive roach raced between my legs to hang out on the doorway, so I was effectively trapped.

I can deal with spiders. I can deal with moutemoutes. I can even deal with blister beetles, but there is something about a roach that I just cannot deal with. I attempted to kill it using my heavy-duty hiking boots, but pas de chance (no luck); it disappeared into the night.

(More happy things to follow. I'll try to get a picture of me with a million bananas soon)