House Fire

On Friday night Curtis and I were talking with the kids at the dormitory when Muti (a former resident, now on break from trade-school and working as our handyman) came running up to us and said “the bad insects are on your house!” I asked for a little bit of clarification, and he said; “these insects are very dangerous.” Debra was standing near us and said they were the ants she had told us about that invaded her house once before…I really didn’t want my house invaded by “dangerous insects”. I went to the house to find that Muti had been telling the truth; one whole side of our house was covered in ants- the wall looked like it was a black blob, so did the ground and they were starting to move to the front of the house. Debra had told us that after her house had been invaded some of the locals told her the only way to get rid of them was with ash…after she had spent one night not able to sleep in her house because of all the ants she tried it and it worked. That is what we did –Muti and some of the boys ran back to the kitchen and started carrying down shovels of red hot ash. (Every time anyone walked close to the house to throw ash they would get bit – hard! This is why these ants are called dangerous. I got bit so many times!) I thought it was never going to get all the ants with as many trips as they would need to take, so I was in the process of starting a little fire and then was going to spread the ash…well the boys liked my idea and made a very big fire around half of our house. Thankfully, it worked! The ants are gone and no one got hurt…but it was an experience!

The picture is of Muti spreading the fire around our house. You can also see in the left of the picture where the shovels full of ash were thrown on our house (that is the front of the house).