Bugs

Bugs in Senegal were not like bugs anywhere else.  They tended to be larger and more vicious than anything I'd encountered before.  My buggy experiences living in Bafata ranged from ants that draw blood when they bite to flies that can draw blood through a thick t-shirt, from giant bees on leashes to cicadas the size of a bird.

Tsetse flies
One example of an African bug is the tsetse fly, commonly associated with sleeping sickness.  Sleeping sickness is a wasting disease, the primary symptom of which is great fatigue and listlessness that causes the victim to sleep.  Ultimately, if untreated the victim will sleep forever.  Fortunately, in Senegal these flies carried a form of sleeping sickness that only affected horses, but not humans.  Because of that, there were no horses, mules, or donkeys in the region.  They did not seem to affect other animals though, so there were plenty of sheep, goats, cattle and other 4 legged critters.

The tsetse fly is larger than the ordinary house fly, and even larger than what we call a "horse fly."  You can generally hear them coming.  They are quite loud, and when they find a victim, they head straight for him with single minded determination.  The tsetse fly will bite you through a t-shirt, even a thick one, and will draw blood.  They are painful, nasty pests.  The only good thing about them is that they don't swarm, and I tended to run into only 1 or 2 of them at a time.  They are also slow and easy to swat.

Cicada
In the village I lived in a round mud hut about 15' in diameter.  I had a little "back yard" area about 6' x 8' built of palm fronds and supported by the walls of the hut on two corners, by a wooden post on a third, and by a small mango tree on the fourth corner.  The mango tree provided both shade and additional privacy as its branches and leaves extended almost the length of the fence.

One day I was standing back there when I heard a loud "burrrrrr" sound like someone revving up a Cessna single engine plane behind me.  I whirled around in surprise, but the sound abruptly stopped and there was no sign of any plane.  I had learned that a lot of the wildlife in Senegal tended to blend in very well with the background, so I carefully scanned everything.  The last thing I wanted to do was to accidentally run into something big enough to make such a loud sound.  That sound had been very close.

I spotted what looked like a grasshopper sitting on top of the palm frond fence.  The only problem was that grasshoppers aren't that big.  The grasshoppers in Washington and Oregon are pretty small, about an inch at most.  I had lived briefly in Switzerland when I was 6 and seen larger grasshoppers, but they were only about 2 inches long.

This monster was at least 8 inches long.  At first, and against all logic I actually thought it was a plastic model.  But then I saw its multifaceted eyes moving around and its mandibles working back and forth and knew that it was quite real.  In some amazement, I walked up to it and looked more closely.  The eye facets were big enough that I could see light reflecting from each one.  It seemed to be looking at me, which was no wonder.  After all, I had just walked up to it and was now looming over it.

I started to reach out to touch it, but thought better of it.  A moment later it suddenly put out its wings and with a loud roar like an airplane, it took off.  A couple of months later I was in Dakar on other business and I ran into another volunteer who was an entomologist - a bug scientist.  I described the insect to him and asked him what it was.  He answered, "That was a cicada.   They swarm every few years and eat everything."
Holy cow!  I can hardly imagine a swarm of those things.  They certainly would be devastating to crops and people alike.  I mentioned that I had thought about picking it up.  He told me it was good thing that I didn't.  "Remember," he said, "they have an exoskeleton and they are very, very hard.  If those mandibles got your finger, they would take it off without any trouble."

If only I'd thought about that when I rescued that drowning rat!  Ah, but that's another story.

Bee on leash
I was walking outside of Bafata taking in the sights one day when I saw a boy about 12 or 13 years old walking along.  He appeared to be holding something in his hand, but I couldn't see anything at first.  As I got closer, I could see a large bumble bee bumbling ahead of him.  He had his hand out in front of him as though he was directing it.  It turned out that he had it on a slender string, almost a thread.  The bee did not seem fazed by this.

I watched as he walked off down the path.  Later, I asked a villager about this.  He said that some young kids like to catch the bees and tie a thin thread around their middle and walk them around.  It's a kids thing, he explained.  It gets old in a hurry.  I said that it must be hard to catch the bee without getting stung.  He shrugged, as though that was an easy thing to learn.  Perhaps it was, but it was something that I never learned!

Walking stick
Senegal is the only place that I have seen a walking stick in the wild.  After seeing the stick, I can honestly say that it was probably not the only walking stick that I've seen.  It was just the only one that I actually knew was a bug and not a stick.

You see, the walking stick looks exactly - and I mean exactly like a stick.  When it is still, I can't tell it apart from a stick.  It even has appendages that look like leaves.  The only way that I can tell that it isn't a stick is if it moves, or if it is out of context, such as on somebody's shirt.  After seeing the walking stick I kept a vigilant eye out for others, but never saw one.  I probably was looking straight at them a few times, but never noticed.

Ants
I have several ant stories.  For now I will say only that there were millions of these insects around, in every size and type.  There were little teeny ones that would form lines so dense you could pick them up (carefully using a stick) and they would form a single, long mass.  There were huge driver ants that marched in regimented formations 2 abreast, with sentries running along the edges.  These all had huge pincers and could easily draw blood if they pinched you.  In fact, the Africans sometimes used them to suture wounds shut, or so I was told.  I never actually saw that done.  I did follow the driver ant columns a few times though, to see where they were going and what they were going to do.  One column marched straight up to and into a termite mound and came out bringing termite larvae with them.

The termites built huge mounds up to 8 feet high.  If you broke a piece off or stuck a stick into one, then waited a few minutes you would see termites show up to inspect the damage, then retreat.  After a few more minutes, more would turn up to start repairs.  They were remarkably organized.

One day I had walked about a mile from the village and was sitting against a tree at the edge of a copse, reading a book.  I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a line of small ants going up the tree just inches away from me.  Typically, ants don't deviate much from their path, but they were inside my "personal space," and I was uncomfortable, so I thought I'd move.  Besides, it was getting pretty hot out there in the sun, so I thought I'd move into the shade of the copse of trees.  I carefully took note of the line of ants on the ground and stepped to one side of them.  I was surprised to discover that my foot was instantly covered with ants of all sizes and colors.  I then noticed that while I had been focused on one particular line of ants, the entire forest floor was covered with ants of all kinds.  I had never seen anything like it.  Usually ants kept to their own kind and either avoided or attacked others.

But I didn't pause to think about it for long.  I had already started to take my next step, but suddenly realized that if I continued on into the grove of trees, my feet and soon my entire body would be covered with ants.  With images of Leningen rushing through my mind, and unable to suddenly reverse course at that point and go back out, I turned my next step into a leap onto a fallen log.  That log was some ways away, but I executed a flawless leap worthy of any cartoon superhero, landing perfectly on it although it was round, bumpy and slanted at about 45 degrees.

Remember that there were already ants on the foot that I had planted on the forest floor.  Those included driver ants, and they were headed up my pants leg.  I began furiously batting at my pants.  I figured that I'd head them off at the knee.  If they got higher than that I was going to be in trouble!  I lost my flip flop in the battle, but I successfully held the line and defeated the invading hordes.  The driver ants had taken their toll though, and I was bleeding from several wounds.  Another, smaller breed of ant had also been biting me and leaving small, red, very painful welts.  I was not a happy camper.

I looked around and discovered that I was an unhappy camper on a fallen log in the middle of a grove that was infested with ants.  It was at least 10 feet to the edge of the grove.  I was sure that I'd never jumped that far before, and from my precarious position on the log, it would be a tough maneuver.  The only alternative was to wait until the ants went away.  Even if I were inclined to wait it out (and there was no place to sit on that log,) I thought nervously about how long it would take the ants to decide to come up the log after me.  And besides, I wondered, what's up here that is causing them not to come up here?  That was a bit worrying by itself.

In the end, I leapt.  I figured that if I missed and landed in the ants, I could just run like hell until I was out of the copse, then start whacking at myself again to get rid of any ants that had gotten on me.  In a stunningly acrobatic move, fueled by adrenalin and desperation, I actually cleared the 10 feet and all of the ants.  With one bare foot and one flip flop, I marched home to Bafata, occasionally stopping to pick off some misguided ant that had gotten into my clothing.

Mosquitoes
There isn't a lot to say about mosquitoes in Africa except that there are a lot of them.  There are anopheles, which carry malaria, and aedis egypti, which carry yellow fever, and a host of others.  Mosquitoes only come out in particular light and temperature conditions, usually in the cool of the evening.  It would not be possible to survive a night without mosquito netting.  Some of the Africans use sheets, and it gets very, very hot in there.  I used the traditional mosquito netting, which was a lot cooler.

Mosquito netting has some drawbacks.  If you tear even one strand of it, mosquitoes will find the hole and come in.  Holes have to be sewn up immediately.  When I first got to the village, I used some thread that I'd brought for clothing repair.  But one day, a villager gave me a better idea.  He was perplexed by my dental floss, and was turning it over and over, looking at intently, trying to figure out what it was for.  Suddenly, understanding dawned.  He looked at me and said in Balant, "I know what this is!"  He pointed to the mosquito netting, then to the floss, then to a hole in the netting, and then made sewing motions.  

Suddenly I knew what it was for as well.  After that, I used dental floss to repair the netting when it needed it.

Mosquitoes were ubiquitous enough that every morning any surface of my body that touched the netting during the night would be bitten.  This tended to be the backs and palms of my hands, and the bottoms of my feet.  I can safely say that mosquito bites on the palms and the soles of the feet are the worst!

The upside of all this was that when I came back to the states, mosquitoes here have no effect on me.  I can get bitten over and over and they never raise a welt or cause an itch any more.