Our adopted so-called friends!
on Melissa Hipkins (Rwanda), 29/Nov/2010 07:42, 34 days ago
In the canon of aggravations and irritants, the mosquito pales beside the flea. Mosquitoes have a deservedly poor reputation and certainly for the majority of the population here who don’t have nets or preventative medicines they represent a potent threat to health. But in terms of sheer annoyance the flea has it hands down.We had accepted that more attention from insects and their ilk would come with the territory and it was not many weeks after we arrived that we began to notice the incidence of bites was on the rise. At first it was easy to blame mosquitoes for any places that itched, but mosquitoes generally confine themselves to having a go at the exposed parts of the body. So far as I can make out they favour the direct approach, they are not wont to crawl up sleeves or trouser legs. It appeared however that a high proportion of our bites did not conform to this pattern. Whatever was to blame looked to have a predilection for skin covered by clothes; dark, confined and sometimes humid places.Initially, when we began to be aware of bites not easily explained by mosquitoes, I thought we might have bed bugs. The bed we are using is second hand from a departing volunteer and the house had not been occupied by anyone from VSO, so any previous infestations would not be known to us. However, after taking the bed to bits and carefully examining all the bedroom walls, bed bugs looked less likely as an explanation. The problem came and went over the next few months but the marked reduction of my bites while away lecturing in Musanze confirmed it was a phenomenon connected more with our house than anything else. It has always been me who has been affected more severely so I was the one more interested in discovering the cause.Melanie had had similar problems and put me on to the scent of fleas; it’s something I had not ever considered. We are used to the human flea being on the endangered list in the UK, the old flea circuses having long gone out of business for want of trained performers. She was convinced she was picking them up from the buses but had no concrete evidence to back it up.To me it had the same implausibility of picking up infections off lavatory seats, but it made me begin to look at bus seats more carefully.Once I had my eye in, I indeed did begin to see fleas in buses. Or rather, I’d see a little black splinter shaped object that on closer inspection would suddenly disappear. Now having some circumstantial evidence that fleas could be at the seat of our woes, the problem was what to do about them.Conversations with other volunteers revealed that many others suffered from similar skin irritations and that probably there is a widespread infestation, but in many cases no smoking gun to prove it. The general complaint was that there seemed no effective way to control these pests. Most are reluctant to use insecticides. Even if they were widely available, the futility of the recent spraying of our house against mosquitoes makes me doubt their effectiveness and delivering sufficient quantities into the right places is problematic.I became more convinced in my view that fleas were responsible as I was able to connect an awareness of them on me with the development a few hours later of the reaction to their bites. They betrayed their presence most plainly to me while I was sitting down. There is a feeling of something crawling slowly between the cloth of the trousers and the skin; a quick visit to the bathroom to investigate further revealed nothing. The bites seem to be limited to the parts of one’s clothing that fit the closest. This ties in with their fondness for tight spaces, just where these movements seem concentrated.The first real evidence was a flea in the bedclothes; again a black, boat-shaped object a couple of millimetres long that disappears in an instant immediately after pulling back the sheet. The fact that there was no direct re-appearance seemed to point to it bailing out onto the floor.The great merit of living in an ordinary Rwandan house is that there are no carpets; the floors are a shiny smooth cement skim. To sweep over the bedroom floor is easy and quick and it was not long before I could see small objects wriggling to get themselves upright and then vanish in a flash. The only way I have found practical to catch them is to repeat the sweeping until they exhaust themselves jumping; I can then pick them up and stick them on tape to produce a rogue’s gallery. The variety of sizes and therefore specie is quite a revelation, but comforting if it means they are not yet breeding in the house. The strategy has reduced the index of irritation, but this immediate success has to be tempered with the thought that unavoidable bus journeys could startthe whole process again.Jacky pretty much organises her day without much help from me now and I let her get on with what ever she considers needs doing. I was engaged in my usual morning tasks around the laptop when a rather startled Jacky came to me holding an object partly wrapped in the cloth she uses for wiping the floors. She had been in our room poking around under the bed when she came across something that would put the wind up anyone. She had bravely caught this creature in the cloth and brought it to me for inspection. What I saw was a praying mantis all of 6” long. Close up they do look particularly menacing with their air of stealth, bizarre triangular head and front legs held like a boxer. I was able to take it from her by clasping it round the abdomen and giving it liberty in the back yard. Liberty was in the form of chucking it up in the air hoping it would use its bird-like wings to fly off. However, after its sojourn under the bed it perhaps wasn’t in the best of health and it decided that the long drop was all it could manage.I felt a twinge of conscience after half an hour or so, so I went out to see what was happening. It had not flown away but crawled over to be more in the shade of the wall. Mantises are not known to favour concrete yards so I relocated it to the small hedge on the north side of the house. There I imagined it would lead a richer life and maybe eat a pest or two. If I’d thought about it, I should have put it back under the bed to see if it was any good against fleas.