Ants

When you think you've seen everything, the ants push up the tiles in your livingroom and begin to build a new nest right there between the fan and the TV.

Trying to Leave

It was a typical Honduran moment when things that should be normal fall apart with that crashing, crushing feeling that perhaps you really should just go back to bed and start the whole day over tomorrow.

Friday I wanted to go to Nicaragua for the long weekend. I wanted to take a shower and catch the bus at the gas station just up the road from us. There was a scorpion in the shower and the bus passed me by without so much as a glance in my direction as I attempted to wave him down with my already purchased bus ticket.

5 hours later I did manage another bus, and ten hours after that I sat at the Pacific and drank a cold beer. The next morning I had coffee roasted on site with bagel in hand, the warm sun already making me lazy, the steady gossip of old acquaintances welcoming me back, and another scorpion in the bathroom. I really do think he's following me.

Wednesday's Beetle

You think it's just another Wednesday when you wake up. There's the shower, and breakfast, and drive down the hill to school, down the dirt road that now errupts as a cloud of dirt when anyone passes. It's almost the hot season and almost the dry season, but not quite. It's only Wednesday.

Then, as you are thinking nothing special about an average day, you see a hump in the dirt that looks like a big seed, only it's in the shape of a beetle (only it's the size of your hand), and you kick it and what should have been a seed, because it's soft and brown, suddnly sprouts long black legs that are swimming in the dirt and not letting it move. And you know it's a beetle and you think it's dying.


So, you call over the kids to look because you are right in front of school, and then you take him inside and show him around, and you get to tell the kids, Hey! this is not an ordinary Wednesday. Today is the day you are looking at and touching the strongest animal on Earth! Well, with proportional measuring, anyway. Kids, today you are going to learn about the Rhinocero Beetle!

To be more exact, we found the Megasoma elephas elephas, a member of the scarab beetle family. And these beetle can lift 850 times their weight. So, I have the kids see if they can lift their own weight, and they run around picking up their friends, then I pick up two of them and they think I'm Superman, and then we try to draw a picture of the beetle carrying 850 other beetles and the kids realize they can't count that high, so it must be a lot.

And then the beetle dies. First he slows down, then he rests, his leg stuck into the plum that we had put into his bowl. And by the end of recess he is gone.

Where did the beetle go, they ask me. To join John and Geoge, I say, but they don't get my joke. I think I'll name him Stuart, the fifth Beetle, after death.