Like this:

I’ve been really struggling with what to write in the blog this week. I know it seems odd but there just haven’t been too many blog-worthy events. I did go swimming in the dirty dam again and became the human slide for children under 5. Innocent killed a puff adder at his house. I wasn’t even involved in the killing process. I was just there to yell, “Kill it! It brought sin into the world!” Even Thanksgiving came and went with no excitement. It never feels like a holiday without family, friends, food, football, and fighting. I tried to provoke Chipo into fighting with me like my brother would to get that homey feel but she wouldn’t do it. We had chocolate pudding for breakfast (as in the chocolate puddin’ and biscuits) and macaroni and cheese for dinner. It was a great Zambian Thanksgiving.

Friday morning around 4:00AM, it started raining. Our rains had disappeared for awhile so it was so nice to hear a wonderfully loud thunderstorm outside. It rained and rained and rained until around 10:30. This meant no going to school for me. I played outside. I watched Gilmore Girls. I took a nap. It was a wonderful day.
I know I don’t discuss the night life of Senkobo a lot. Mostly because there is no night life aside from an occasional game of hide and go seek when there is no electricity. But, and this is a big but, Black Friday was an exciting night in our little village of the world. The ants came! The rains in the morning had made all the edible ants come out of the ground. It was like Alfred Hitchcock made a comedy. Here’s what happened:
Whenever it rains, the bug population in this house grows insanely large. I won’t give details because it would appall my mother how many bugs I live with. We (seven of us) were sitting in the kitchen/living/dining room floor playing UNO and killing every bug we saw. Out of nowhere comes this dragonfly-ant hybrid genetic mutant bug. Sarah flips out and tries capturing it. The others see the mutant bug, catch the same fever, and start shouting,”INSWA!” They open the door and instantly the apartment is filled with flying edible mutant bugs. It was like the Birds when the house fills with flesh-eating crows. It was a mad scramble then to collect buckets full of water to drown the ants. We got our buckets and headed to the closest light source to see a modern day plague. It was ridic! I couldn’t believe how many ants were flying around. We headed to Pastor George’s house because he has a low security light on his porch. As I was walking to the house, you could see the ants in swarms all flying to the light. You couldn’t even open up your eyes under the light because the ants were so thick. They would fly behind my glasses and inside my ears. The kids were ecstatic. They really acted like filet mignon was falling from the sky. For the next hour, we roamed around the farm under every light we could find and collected as many ants as we could. We easily collected 10 pounds of ants. Do you know how many ants it takes to make 10 pounds?

After we got back into the house, we had a nice midnight snack of fried ants and even a few live ants. Again, I struggled with putting a live insect in my mouth but I did it. I started laughing hysterically as I was eating my fried ants. I tried to explain to Chipo what my friends would say if they saw me greedily covering ants in salt and pepper and devouring them. What would they say if they saw the huge bucket of ants outside my door that we would eat over the next few days? They would get the big J – jealousy. I’m sure of it.

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