Tropical Climates and Insects

So Maewo is a fantastic island, there are rivers coursing down almost the entire island, there are spectacular waterfalls everywhere, and the ocean is usually within about 2-15 minutes of walking from almost anywhere on the island. This is all incredible and being that I like swimming and jumping in water and all that, I couldn’t be happier. Of course all this water comes with its drawbacks. The humidity on Maewo is pretty unreal. The only way to ever make sure anything dries out is to put it in the sun for about 4 hours, which can be hard to do as Maewo frequently has rain. I hang all my clothes up on clothes hangers and then string them from a clothes line in my house and they still get damp and the cottons mold. I have to carry my mattress outside and toss it in the sun every time there is good sun, because if not, mold will grown on it. The other day I baked a loaf of bread until it was rock hard on accident and by the next morning it was soft. Haha, I think you get the idea, you redefine what dry is on this island. I’ve decided if I cant wring water out of a shirt, its dry enough to wear. I’m sure 2 years here is going to make me appreciate the dryness of tucson. Another great thing that comes with all the water is the insects. If you leave a jar of peanut butter open for about an hour, you wont be able to see the peanut butter inside anymore from the number of ants that will miraculously show up out of no where. They will get to candy that is in “air tight” ziplock bags. They even managed to get into a sealed tin of Cookies, how I have no idea?

If you don’t mind eating ants, which most people don’t at all because they’re in almost anythign that is edible here, then they’re a great source of extra protein I’m sure Bear Grylls would tell you. Flies are the next insect that bother me. While most of the time they’re just annoying because you know they hang out in feces all day and then come try to fly into your nose, whenever you have a cut, or scrape, or open sore of any type, they seem to come out of the wood work. My younger brother got a pretty bad cut climbing a tree the otherday and I am pretty sure there was about 40 flies inside of a 2 inch cut when he sat down at the kitchen table for lunch. I have to cover every cut I get because it grosses me out too much to see flies landing on them. Finally, the worst thing about the insects here are the mosquitoes. While, my family keeps telling me that it is just the season for mosquitoes and they’ll start going away as the island gets “colder” right now there are days when I don’t know if the whine of mosquitoes is imagined or really there because I feel like it doesn’t ever stop sometimes. There are one or two breeds of mosquitoes here that will still bite me even while im wearing mosquito repellent and am sitting in my house burning a mosquito coil. Luckily, after drinking a shell of kava at night, you don’t even notice the bites anymore.