The Many Jobs of a Missionary ~ Exterminator, Flying Creatures

These flying creatures I don't mind. Gold finches build hanging nests in the tree right outside of our study, and we feast our eyes on them every spring.

Now that you are fully creeped out by my former descriptions of Africa as THE home of all things crawly and fascinating, I thought I'd wrap it up with those nightmarish descriptions of things that can take wing and follow you or actually get-in-your-face:

Mosquitoes

Annoying, loud or silent, deadly at times, and incessant. Not so bad here in our home, but terrible--causing sleepless nights--if you cross the border to Zimbabwe or Mozambique. We can get malaria here, but it's uncommon. Just a little farther to the north, it is both common and deadly. I wrote a bit about my fears concerning malaria here. We've become experts at homemade window screens and all forms of insect repellant--electrical plug-ins, sprays, creams, roll-ons, burning smoke coils.

Wasps

We catch insects and draw them for our nature journal.

Interestingly, it took a nature reader from a Christian publishing company to figure out what kinds of wasps continually built under the eaves of our house. They are the paper wasp.

You know, I've noticed--get ready for something really profound here--that critter issues are worse the farther from city life you go. I know, that's a shocker. But on my one trip to very rural Mozambique, I noticed the bugs everywhere! You couldn't even enjoy a quiet time with the Lord without feeling like you'd sat in an ants' nest or should just start waving away mosquitoes full-time.

On one trip to Mozambique, our teammate left his truck's windows down overnight. The next morning, to all the guys' dismay (especially to another teammate, who is allergic), the truck was full of bees. The guy with an allergy got far away; and the other wrapped a tarp around himself showing only his eyes, eased himself into his truck, and drove full speed down the road with windows and doors open until the bees went somewhere else to make their nest.

He didn't get stung once!

Bats

Don't you just hate these guys? They fly in such an erratic pattern, looking like they'll zoom into your face on accident. Two bat memories--when my parents came to visit, we went to a game park to see the wild animals, and while making our dinner at an outdoor kitchen, the bats began to fly around for their nightly meal. It was a fright to my mom who grew up with bats in her attic and a brother who loved to take a bat upstairs and play a game of hit-as-many-as-I-can-while-they-fly-around-my-head. :)

When we built our house in the village, we had no ceiling for the first nine months. I remember when a bat got in and couldn't get back out. It was during our first two weeks living there in the house. It would fly around at night, and Seth would jump from roof truss to roof truss trying to scare it out of the cracks it had entered by. It was not easy to sleep wondering if a bat was over your head!

Others

These aren't the kind that eat flowers, but they're close.

We have pretty black and yellow beetles that fly into our yard whenever the flowers bloom. I hate them because they sound like bumblebees, and they gorge themselves eating all of our flowers. :(

When it rains hard, flying termites escape their flooded holes in the ground and flutter all over. At first I called them "throbby bottoms" because that's exactly what they looked like. I literally thought I would go mad during my first few encounters of them getting into our house. They crowd around the lighted windows seeking a way out of the rain. They have four cellophane wings which barely hold them up and which they easily lose. They don't fly very well, so they actually do fly right into your head. It is sooo unnerving. The Africans simply pluck of their wings and eat them (usually fried first!)

Look at that walkingstick!

We have some big, colorful grasshoppers and walking sticks, and mango flies, which I haven't seen but have heard of. They can lay eggs in your laundry drying on the line. Then they hatch inside your skin, and if you don't pinch them out while they're small, it gets very painful. I hope I never experience that! There are ticks that can cause nasty flu-like symptoms and need strong antibiotics to get rid of. I'll never forget when I got tick bite fever while pregnant! And fruit flies and normal flies are here as well of course.

I think that's it. See, that's all! haha. When are you coming for a visit??

God's Recipe for Happiness by Suzy Crocket

Suzy Crocket is a missionary wife in Romania, would you consider helping their building fund by purchasing a copy (or two or three!) of her book? 


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In the Dog House (Part 2) Shoot Out at the OK Corral

********WARNING***********

The following post will convince you of one of two things:

You will realize that missionaries learn, by God's grace, to see the world from a different perspective, making the most of what they have to work with...

OR

You will be convinced that missionaries are a little nutty,

which helps them do what they must do.

Either way, enjoy this lighthearted, fun post.

The Many Jobs of a Missionary ~ Exterminator, The Slithery Kind

A snake we killed for our neighbor.

Oh, the enmity between the slippery serpent and humans since the beginning of time. When you think of rural missionary work, snakes and critters definitely make up part of the picture. We've killed our share of snakes around here. I'd say we average one for every year and a half?

Our favorite snake-killing story happened before I was even in SA. When we first moved here, we rented a small house on a Boer's farm where my husband lived single for a year before I came. His neighbor, renting another house, called him over one night to help kill what he claimed was a Mozambican spitting cobra that had gotten under his sink. Seth will never forget this Afrikaner spewing out venom of his own, "I HATE snakes!" as he faced his sink with a 30-whatchamacallit shotgun.

"You're not going to shoot at your sink, are you?" Seth asked disbelievingly. His neighbor repeated his feelings about snakes and then BAM! shot under his own sink. He hit the snake but didn't completely kill it. They chopped off its head with a machete; but it's mouth still opened and closed, hissing, for several minutes. Isn't that creepy?



One time in youth group in Mashamba (the village we first worked in with a national pastor), a young girl came up to me and whispered, "There's a snake in the roof." Sure enough over a row of girls' heads, a snake was resting in the rafters. I still remember Seth interrupting our teammate's sermon with a calm whisper, then turning around with an attempt at a calming announcement, "Girls over here, please quietly move over to the other side. We need to kill a snake."

Calm over! Pandemonium ensued. Screaming girls tripped over each other, rushing to the other side of the auditorium. It was funny in its unexpected disparity from my husband's calm announcement.

I have even killed my own snake. (Can you hear the self-satisfaction in that line?) It was four inches long and a millimeter wide. :) I could maybe make a toe ring out of it. I crushed it with my shoe and then a clothesline peg. (Maybe that gives a clue as to what I was doing when I found it!)

Snakes are an area for me to learn to increase my trust in the Lord for the safety of my children. It's something that does no good to worry or imagine the possibilities of.

Lizards

Here's a pretty one.

I admit to a kind of critical spirit towards the Africans about lizards. I remember driving to youth group when we used to rent on the farm, and seeing up to four lizards running on the outside wall of a one-room house in the village, and thinking, "I will not allow lizards to take over my house like that."

Since one of my two lone visits to the church outhouse in Mashamba involved a lizard dropping on my head (the other visit involved a spider), I have forever afterwards been slightly traumatized regarding outhouse usage (besides the usual stigma attached to outhouses!)

But now I don't mind them. When we built our house in the village and began seeing them take up residence with us, we asked pest control how to exterminate them. They said it was illegal to kill them. We were shocked!

Now I appreciate them. They stay mostly in the roof or garage, or near the ceilings, and don't usually come down to floor level, and certainly not in clothing or bedding or anything like that. And they eat other little bugs and critters. We've even gotten to see killings up close, as they sit on the outside of a window at night, creep up on a moth, and fast as lightning grab it in their mouths and gulp it down whole in a few convulsive swallows. Kinda gross, but I cheer them on. We even caught one to draw for nature study one day.



One interesting fact about lizards (this linked picture shows Colin holding a lizard with a blue tail!)--if you scare them, they'll detach their tail and leave it slithering on by itself behind them as a defensive tactic while they run away. The predator goes for the tail, and the lizard gets away safe. But then they have no tail for a while until it grows back.

Slugs

These weren't so common until the recent rainy seasons we've had in which it rained so much that we had floods. I still remember our sole vacation to Durban, on the 14th floor of an apartment building, where slugs were on the toilets! I thought it was due to being right on the ocean, but it still surprises me that they were so high up in the building. We've also seen snails on our windows during really rainy times.

Slugs don't bother me too much unless I accidentally touch them on a shoe or book I'm picking up. That's a *gag* moment.
Miscellaneous Other Slitherers and Crawlers



There are some really neat worms and caterpillars over here. Some the Africans eat-- "meat," they call them. The most famous is the "Mopane worm" which you can find fried up at street corners for a crunchy snack. I haven't convinced myself to try those yet. Shudder.

The Africans will jump a few feet high in the air to get away from fuzzy, hairy caterpillars, however, if they see them. They make you ITCH if you touch them.



Millipedes and Centipedes

This final category is creepy as well. The centipedes are rare but scary, gyrating across your floor out of nowhere very fast. We kill them ASAP. We even heard of one that's dangerous, that hisses by clapping its antennae together. Very creepy. We've only seen two of those, and not for long, before they were no more.

The biggest millipede I've ever seen.

Millipedes are more common. They're slower, lumbering across the grass or floor. If you touch them, they curl up into balls, and if you scare them or try to smush them, they leave a brown liquid trail behind them. The Africans won't play with them either, and an Afrikaner (linked in the story at the top) told me that she'd heard they were poisonous. I'm not sure whether to believe that or not, but I don't let the kids touch them now.

I have become an amateur naturalist, trying to identify flora and fauna around here. But don't worry. I'm winding down on this topic--only one more week comin'. I can't speak for Charity over there in Asia, though. ;)