Ants...AGAIN!

It has been a looong time since I've posted anything, but I think this not-so-rare occurrence is reason enough to start up again. It all started this morning when I was sound asleep, only to be woken up by my LOUD neighbors at 4 in the morning!  I'm not sure what the commotion was, but I was anything but happy about all of the noise that was keeping me from falling back into a peaceful slumber.  Finally after God knows how long, I fell back into an off and on again slumber until about 6 o clock when my neighbor walked to my room window and shouted in, "Keza!"  I attempted to pretend as if I was in such a deep sleep that I didn't hear her, but of course (as usual) that didn't work.  She just stood there and shouted my name two more times.  At this point I thought to myself, I really wish these people could take a hint, I'm obviously sleep in here!  Finally I responded to her shouts with a sleepy "Yeah?"  Her next words were enough to get me out of bed in a jiffy.  She blurted out a whole slew of words in Kinyarwanda, but the only ones I was able to pick out were "ants," "many," and "INSIDE!!!"  At that, I jumped up and ran to my door to see what she was talking about. 

When I opened the door,

my neighbor looked up at me and then pointed down at the ground, "There are many ants in your house!"  she said in Kinyarwanda.  My first thought when I looked down was, oh no!! My snacks!!  It's kind of funny now.  Out of all the food I have in my house: bread, veggies, leftovers...the only thing I was worried about were my care package snacks.  I can always buy another head of cabbage or carrots at the market, but those last packs of trail mix and Oreo's are irreplaceable in this country!  With that being said, the first thing I ran to check was my pantry where all of my goodies are stored (or hidden, depending on who comes to visit lol).  Whew, I thought to myself.  That was a close one.  Now to find out where the little buggers were running off to.

After thoroughly checking my pantry, I turned around to face my cooking area and vualah, there they were!  I saw a HUGE mountain of HUGE ants and ran back to my door to get help from my neighbor.  No way I could tackle those alone!  She and one of the male students who live behind my house walked back in with me and I pointed to two bottles of cooking oil that sit on my cooking table.  The two bottles are yellow with red caps, but the only color you could see until about 2 inches from the bottom was black.  There were so many ants that you couldn't even tell there was a bottle underneath!  After the fact, I wish I had taken a picture, but things were moving just a little bit too fast.  All I wanted was to get those monsters out of my house and fast!  Since I did forget to take a picture though, I'll help you paint one in your head.  Have you ever seen the movie Ants?  And do you remember the part near the end when the ants climbed onto one another to build a 'rope' to climb out of the hole to keep from drowning?  Well, this same exact 'rope' is what these ginourmous ants had built in my house.  I stared for a split second in awe as my mind went back to the movie.  I never would have guessed in a million years that ants could actually do that!  They were only holding onto each other!  And the rope was actually really strong! O.O

Long story short, my neighbor boiled some hot water and we poured that over the ants in my house then swept them out.  As we did this, she said to me, "You're lucky, you only had a few.  I had many!"  I just looked at her.  How on Earth could you have had more than me??!  But I guess it is possible.  Lucky for me I have a pantry and plastic bins to store my food in so the bugs can't eat it all.  Her food is just in bags on the ground in her house so they got into EVERYTHING she had.  After killing as many ants as we could with the hot water, the student who was helping us called us back outside, "Look!"  I just about passed out at the sight.  There were ants literally EVERYWHERE!  All around the perimeter of our house and all over the backyard!  Small holes, large holes, big ants, BIGGER ants; it was a mess!  I ran back in the house to grab my bug spray and the three of us went around the yard spraying any and everything we could find.  Eventually (from what we could see) most of the ants were dead and we hopped around piles of dead (and dying) ants as we made our way back inside our respective homes.  All the while, we were laughing at each other; me at them for scratching and twitching like there were ants all over them, and them at me for doing the exact same thing.  I can say one good thing about all this though...at least this time the ants weren't in my bed.  I would have died!  O.O  No really...I would not have lived through that.

Love and Peace Corps,

Dametreea

P.S.  These aren't your run-of-the-mill, ordinary ants.  These bad boys have super strength!  Somehow even with all of my jumping and stomping around, a few ants still seemed to climb up my sandal and bite my toes.  Someone please tell me...since when do ants like feet????