I expected bugs when I came to Africa. And they are here.  They’re a lot like our bugs, at least the ones I’ve seen.  But I expected Big Bugs like in National Geographic.  Most of what I’ve seen are smaller.  I mean really small.  The omnipresent mosquitos who have not yet shown an interest in me (thank God) are tiny.  You could fit 3 of them inside one of our Idaho bloodsuckers.  I bought one of those cool electrified tennis racquets from a hawker on the street.  Think light-saber-bug-zapper.  It’s alarming what a thrill I get when I stalk them and hear that satisfying sizzle.

Since there are two men living in this apartment and our housekeepers are both men, one would expect that stuff doesn’t always get cleaned up on time. Sunday evening is the worst, since that’s the day that Prince and Ernest are off.  One of my little luxuries here is not doing dishes.  Linda would probably ask, “And that’s different how…?”  I’m not going near that mess after Kweku and I have both asserted our culinary skills (Mark, our chef, is also off Sundays).  This leads to the scourge of 5B:  Ants!

These guys are tinytinytiny. And very fast.  And crazy.  They’ll run around in circles over and over again with no (apparent) goal.  I’m picturing my daughter’s cat on meth chasing a laser pointer.  They’ll swarm anything, too.  I’m still trying to figure out what’s so attractive to them about my drum, which they temporarily held hostage.  I’m the coffee addict at the SEED Center, so I fire up the brew in the morning on one of those updated Bunn-o-Matic industrial strength coffee makers.  One morning, I found that someone had dropped a bit of cake on the grate where you add water.  When I lifted the cover, several million ants dived down into the reservoir, taking the morsel with them.  The cleaning lady and I looked at each other conspiratorially.  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” was the unspoken oath.  The coffee was quite flavorful that morning.

Cake is their favorite prey. It is our favorite too.  The battle has raged for several months.  Saran wrap hermetically sealed to the plate barely slows them down.  Someone bought a high tech “cake keeper.”  It was child’s play to these 6-legged demons.  We’d been working with our chef to get him to bake American-style cakes.  Apparently Ghanaians like theirs very thick, like brownies without the charm. One night, Mark cooked the best cake I’ve had in years.  By morning, it was captured by a force of thousands.  By this time, it was Ants 15, Humans  0.  Then came The Moat.

Kweku has an extensive design background, some of it in architecture. While I don’t know the exact genesis of this medieval throwback, his hand can be clearly seen.  The cake is set on a pedestal which is then lowered into a large plastic pan.  Water is added to just below the “cake line.”  Voila!  The Moat.  The ants crowd the shoreline shouting all kinds of high-pitched threats and obscenities, but to no avail.  Victory is savored with a cold glass of milk.

The Moat. Primitive. Effective.