Termites, makoswe and gekkos, oh my

The rains have started and with them an abundance of termites. The winged creatures were scattered on the kitchen floor this morning. Piles of wings were at the door step and scattered over the courtyard waving in the wind. On the roads and in the mud gutters children armed with plastic bottles and sticks were busy collecting them as were the ants, lizards, mice, rats and geckos. Upon my return from language class our guard and I tossed termites to a lovely green chameleon with pronged toes and an extremely long quick tongue. He moved slowly with a wobbly gait and eyes that individually darted backwards and forwards. As he moved from the grass to the dark brown earth his coloration darkened. I noticed the gardener and guard also enjoyed a plate of fried termites for lunch as will many families in Lusaka today. We have decided on baked potatoes and fish however. I suspect Jim would be willing to eat some if I fried them up as he is the only one of us who has a history of swallowing live goldfish at a youth group meeting in high school. Jason should try that one at the next gross food event.

After we cleaned up the termites, I plucked a small red spider dangling off of Jim’s hair and headed for the shower where I encountered two miniature geckos. At first with my glasses off I wondered if they were spiders, large ants or cockroaches but once I figured out what they were I transported them outside. They are awfully cute. Rascal thinks so too and we have found some dismembered ones about the house. The geckos come in and out of the air conditioning units and click loudly at each other and at the large fat spiders that come out at night to eat insects. The geckos in turn eat the spiders if they can catch them. We think we also have makoswe (house rats as opposed to field rats) though we have not seen them. We hear them running at night in the roof. They are so loud they sound like an infestation of raccoons. Some friends have rats that are so nonchalant they run past her in the kitchen when she is cooking. Her rats eat around the poison and have also dug through concrete which they used to patch up the holes in their wall.