A Bugs Life - In Africa

My Bad. I haven't written on this blog for 3 weeks. I could say we've been busy, which we have but that is still no excuse, even if you're fighting flying termites from hell and spiders so large they really belong in a horror movie.

The flying termites first showed up at our house last Saturday, April 24 just after dusk during a rain storm. They were attracted to the light and soon some of them found their way inside our house. Fortunately only about 3 dozen got inside before we closed all the windows and sealed all the cracks, but Cheryl was a little freaked out. We could hear them outside of our bedroom window hitting the window because we had our bedroom light on. The next morning we saw hundreds of wings left from these termites on our front porch and when I turned the corner I saw several thousand wings piled up under a security light that had been left on all night long. In that pile there were still hundreds of termites who had shed their wings and were now travelling who knows where.

We had talked to some of the staff previously about this annual migration of flying termites, and some of the staff said they enjoy collecting the termites and frying them. Cheryl said she wanted to try eating them until she saw hundreds of them crawling out of that pile last Sunday morning before we headed to church. She decided to leave them for any of the staff that might want to try them.

This Saturday, once again, at dusk, after a heavy rain, I spotted two of them on flying on the front porch, grabbed my camera, and within two minutes, there were over 100 flying around the light at the front porch. This photo doesn't do justice to the amount of flying termites we saw, but it gives you an idea.

We have also seen some extraordinarily large grasshoppers at our home in Eldoret, in addition to quite a few more at the Open Arms Village. We haven't had the camera ready when one comes hopping by but they're about 4 times the size of grasshoppers at home. And of course, the staff and the children at the Open Arms Village love to eat them as a snack (although they don't like some that are a certain color).

We have also seen quite a few spiders crawling around at the house in Eldoret, but according to one of our volunteers at the village, the mother of all spiders showed up in one of the homes at our village. Of course we have seen a fair number of average to good size spiders while we've been here, but apparently our village superviser confirmed and killed a spider that was in one of our volunteer's rooms at the village and apparently had a 12 leg span. Unfortunately, they were too terrified to take a photo, and the village supervisor grabbed a can of bug spray to dispatch of the gargantuan spider. I actually looked on the internet at spiders before we came to Africa and found out that the only spider that large is the Goliath Bird Spider which resides mostly in Brazil, but maybe some of the spiders here are eating some good meals or maybe this volunteer exaggerated the size of this spider as she fled the room and ran for help. This photo is not one of ours, just the one from the internet. Either way, Cheryl nor I are planning on eating any spiders soon.

Matt and Cheryl Tallman

P.S. We'll try and send more photos and stories in the next day or two to catch up on what is going on.