13 december 2009

Last night Bethel and I were pretty excited about doing what any young American woman spends an average Saturday night in Rwanda doing - watching a movie curled up under a mosquito net (Nyanza doesn't exactly have the night life of a college town so it's pretty typical to be in bed by 10:30, even on a Saturday night - is this what growing up feels like?).

You know, I thought that there were two kinds of seasons here in Rwanda - rainy and dry, little did I know that there's a third (shoot - maybe a fourth, fifth - mango season, avocado season??) but this third one, it's not a juicy fruit or a ripe vegetable, this third one - it's a plague, and I mean the kind I remember hearing horror stories about in the bible - the kind where the sky goes black, a tidal wave of locust, but this Rwandan plague has a different color scheme. This one comes in leaf green and pale brown and each unit in its force is about 3 inches in length with a 5 inch wing span - this is no exaggeration!! These g.hops (as I have coined them) mean business as they set up camp in every inch of our home, seeking shelter from the awful crow-like birds that unlike seagulls - actually deserve the title of rats of the sky. These disgusting birds wake us up every morning, bouncing around on our tin roof. You'd think there were a cat and dog wrestling around up there with all the ruckus they make!

Well, this third season anyway, it sneaks up on you. We wake up to find the sun shinning, thinking it's like any other day but stepping out of the protection of our closed up bedroom fortress, instantly you know that that is not the case. The walls, the curtains, every edge of the door - making it impossible to close without a crunch - (which is something I just cannot bring myself to do!), is covered with these enormous grasshoppers! As we tip toe around them in fear that they might (and often do) use their spring-like secret weapon to attack. Yikes!

So Bethel and I were curled up on my bed, just starting "The Darjeeling Limited", when we heard it. We've come to pick up on this warning sound, our ears have tuned themselves to listen for the very clear brusling of wings against the walls as the clumsy critters fly carelessly around our room - which sometimes they manage to enter, heaven forbid we should leave our window open a moment to get some fresh air in here!