Snippets of a Desert Life - Insect Invasion!

Just before I arrived back in Korr, they had some rain – half an hour of heavy rain that fell overnight. That’s been about it for this rainy season – not nearly enough for what is needed, but just enough to bring out the bugs!

Before the rains, the flies, looking for moisture, were getting worse and worse and worse. Nick and Lynne told me that they couldn’t even open their mouths to talk without nearly swallowing a fly. With the rain, the flies have dispersed and the moths moved in. For a few days, there were moths EVERYWHERE, and Nick and Lynne would sweep up a mountain of dead moths from the floors in the morning. Now the moths have seemed to go, and it’s beetles. They drop from the ceiling and fall in our hair, our food, everywhere. They fly into the walls and drop to the floor with pings and ticks and clicks. The noise in my room last night as I was trying to fall asleep was incredible!

Though there has been very little rain, it’s been cloudy the last few days, which doesn’t bode so well for the solar panels that supply us with light at night. About 9:30 last night, the battery died and all our lights went out. Nick and I grabbed our headlamps and tried to continue working on our computers, but, the lights just above our eyes was a perfect magnet for the beetles and lingering moths. Needless to say, we didn’t get much work done. Moths fluttering in our eyes, beetles dropping on our heads, and flies crawling all over the screen of the computer made doing anything rather difficult. A grasshopper even hopped onto Nick’s computer and then jumped into Nick’s face!

Perhaps that was God’s way of telling us to make it an early night!