Unwanted House Guests

We have a spare bedroom in our apartment, and on some occasions we've even had the fortune of having people use it. We particularly enjoy visitors from home -- not even necessarily people we know, but people passing through from familiar parts of the world.

And, this being Africa, we also have our share of unwanted house guests.

Ants are a common problem. There are hoards of them. Laura keeps a special towel in the kitchen, reserved for ant removal. I have to remember not to dry the dishes with that one.

And we have to store all of our open food in plastic containers.

The most recent intruders have been dining away at our table for the past week, despite our best efforts to eradicate them. The termites are literally eating the wood of our table, leaving little piles of sawdust on the floor below.

We have a smaller bedside table wrapped in a garbage bag in our freezer. If the kitchen table is the termites' home, the smaller table was perhaps their summer cottage. And judging by their activity, they liked their summer cottage best.

They don't help out around the house, and are really quite a nuisance. They've really been enjoying a novel Laura recently borrowed; it's such a good book that they've devoured the first 50 pages.

There was also a time a couple of weeks ago when a gecko came to visit. The harmless lizard sat on our wall, apparently hoping that we would watch something on television, but we rarely do. When we tried to show him the door, he hid in a crevice of our sofa, so we put the whole sofa on the balcony until the gecko had moved on. (Or had he merely found a better hiding place, deeper within the chair?)

Mosquitos are common back home, but here we have to worry about malaria, which infects nearly half a billion people a year and causes millions of deaths in this part of the world. We take precautions, but I worry about the impact on our health of those precautions, like the little chemical pads that we heat beside our bed to ward them off or the anti-malarial medication that can cause hallucinations.

At least they can't be as harmful as the chemical patch I saw for sale in South Africa. The one that works by seeping repellent into your bloodstream and "turns your urine dark brown and odourous," according to the warning printed on the packaging.

And then there are times that the unwanted house guests don't even have the courtesy to show themselves. We just look at our arms or legs and see the little -- or big -- red swells that they have left behind. Little housewarming presents most recently courtesy of spiders roaming our bed while we try to sleep. Small tokens to say that they appreciate our hospitality.