Room service

The night after the invasion, I asked Jacqueline and Devotah at work what the heck those bugs were. They started giggling. So did Father William, who had overheard my description.

“Did they have four wings?” Devotah asked.

“And did they come off on the floor?” Jacqueline added.

“Those were white ants,” Father William chortled. “Do you know what we do with those? We eat them!”

Okay, it’s going to take me a while to work up to that particular dish. I talked to a few people about it, like my friend Opiyo, the Canadian school principal who grew up in Gulu.

“Oh yeah,” he said over tea that evening. “I just pick them up off the floor and eat them raw. They taste really good.”

Because I have to live here for a little while longer, I’m trying very hard to just accept this. In order to do that, I’ve had to completely rethink the way I conceptualize bugs. I mean, ants are clean creatures, and extremely hard-working. You only have to look at the size of their hills out here to understand that, or watch them carry the whole body of a grasshopper away, like a band of frat boys celebrating over a 500-foot keg.

Okay, I can live with this.

I turn it over in my head again and again, rewriting the grotesqueries into something absurd or poetic. These things are like cheeseburgers. Flying cheeseburgers, just like in a McDonald’s Hamburgler commercial. Should I be afraid of that? Well, okay, maybe if flying cheeseburgers invaded my room at one o’clock in the morning I would be scared out of my wits, but once I knew there was a logical reason for it, I would have hopped out of bed and grabbed myself a nice double-double cheese-cheese burger-burger please. Not going to happen if the ants come again, but at least I’ll be able to think about that if they decide to fly again.

The people here know when the ants are coming. Opiyo says that when the rains come down heavily after a long, hot, dry spell, the worker ant comes and opens up a little eyelet in the mound that others temporarily seal back over. That’s how you know they’re going to fly, when those eyelets appear. Then at night, the workers and the soldiers go, and they look for a new place to make their home. The queen has stayed behind, so they must create their civilization from scratch. They find a good spot with light and moisture, and then they shrug out of their wings, mate, and die. I suppose if the ladies from the hotel didn’t clean the corpses, I’d eventually see the eggs hatch. But so far that hasn’t happened.

So now when I remember the event, sometimes I envision it as an African love ritual. Like the Ndere Troupe dancing with ankle bells, trying to find a partner – only this dance is performed by insects. Imagine them ecstatic to find a new home, calling one another to the light, and like some sweetly unburdened soul casting off every last weight and care – the work at the hill, the unnecessary wings – casting them off and making love with their last, passionate, dying breath.

Anyway, I’m doing my best to accept the situation for what it is, and move on with living. That goes for a lot of things that make me a little bit uncomfortable with Gulu. I can do this for just a week and a half more; I can! And then I will go back to Kampala and meet with Francis again, and we’ll talk about Bashir and life will be easier. But for now, I can handle this. I don’t have to face my fear, I have to embrace it.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t come up with a new way of bug-proofing my room, though. I’m not sure that it would actually work, but I am very thorough now, every night, with how I go to bed. Lights go off when the sun goes down. If I need to work, I do it by the light of my LCD display – which is set to turn itself off after three minutes of no use. That means even if I do fall asleep working, my room will be dark within five minutes. Before I go to bed, I spray the room with insecticide, especially the window and door, and any cracks in the wall. Then I stuff the big crack under the door with the mosquito net I bought for the four-poster bed in Kampala and set up the mosquito net over my bed so it’s nice and taut. I don’t want the net touching me with the ants flying against it, entrée or no. And now I know not to go outside, when they fly. It will only make matters worse. But hopefully if I keep the lights out and my room warded, this won’t happen again to such a degree. Then again, bags of white ants? If what Simone says is true, I’ve hardly seen ants at all. I should be ready for … how should I think about it, this time? I should be ready for a denser wave of guests.