ants
On Mondays we go for a hike, typically it lasts for a couple of hours, as a way to see some of the surrounding area and prepare ourselves for a couple of separate events. In a few weeks we will be doing a 5-6 hour day hike and then a week or so after that we'll have a three day hike were we'll go upwards of 5 hours each day.
To explain a little bit of what hiking looks like, we spend quite a bit of the time on what are called "bus rots" which are paths or trails through the jungle. They may be up or down the side of a mountain and vary in slickness, vegetation, use, steepness, etc.
While we may carefully pick our way up or down (or slide, grasping at anything that will catch us) many people use these paths to go to the market, get water, visit family, etc. and they are often traveled with heavy loads. It has been a real eye opener to not just hear about, but also experience some of what it is like to scale the side of the mountain to get to someone's home from the water source below.
That being said, here's a funny story. Yesterday (Monday), on our hike we were taking a slight detour off the path down a mountain and so were kind of creating the path as we went. Sometime during the uphill climb of this detour I managed to firmly entrench myself into the path of ants, many, many ants! I was covered!
As we kept going, I kept smacking ants and when we got to a place where we were stopping for a minute while we passed another group of hikers and so I was trying to find out whether they were coming from my hat or backpack or clothes and they were everywhere. All of a sudden, several people around me started swatting ants off of me. The whole way back (at least an hour) to the dorms, I kept finding more ants! And you know how it is when you have ants crawl on you and then for the rest of the day you feel like there are ants crawling on you even when there aren't? Ant-paranoia or phantom ants I like to call it. So the whole rest of the day I kept on finding real ants and feeling like they were there even when they weren't.
The teacher for our language learning small group likes for us to tell stories so he can hear us talk and help to correct our pronunciation and vocabulary. This morning, I was sharing my ant story and ironically while I was speaking there were two ants crawling on my leg, which made everyone laugh. My ant-paranoia is not just paranoia. I've been trying not to scratch at real and phantom itches all day! It didn't help that during one of the medical lectures today we talked about different types of skin problems including lice, fleas, etc.!
To explain a little bit of what hiking looks like, we spend quite a bit of the time on what are called "bus rots" which are paths or trails through the jungle. They may be up or down the side of a mountain and vary in slickness, vegetation, use, steepness, etc.
While we may carefully pick our way up or down (or slide, grasping at anything that will catch us) many people use these paths to go to the market, get water, visit family, etc. and they are often traveled with heavy loads. It has been a real eye opener to not just hear about, but also experience some of what it is like to scale the side of the mountain to get to someone's home from the water source below.
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| Banana plant from the bottom of the mountain side we descended. |
That being said, here's a funny story. Yesterday (Monday), on our hike we were taking a slight detour off the path down a mountain and so were kind of creating the path as we went. Sometime during the uphill climb of this detour I managed to firmly entrench myself into the path of ants, many, many ants! I was covered!
As we kept going, I kept smacking ants and when we got to a place where we were stopping for a minute while we passed another group of hikers and so I was trying to find out whether they were coming from my hat or backpack or clothes and they were everywhere. All of a sudden, several people around me started swatting ants off of me. The whole way back (at least an hour) to the dorms, I kept finding more ants! And you know how it is when you have ants crawl on you and then for the rest of the day you feel like there are ants crawling on you even when there aren't? Ant-paranoia or phantom ants I like to call it. So the whole rest of the day I kept on finding real ants and feeling like they were there even when they weren't.
The teacher for our language learning small group likes for us to tell stories so he can hear us talk and help to correct our pronunciation and vocabulary. This morning, I was sharing my ant story and ironically while I was speaking there were two ants crawling on my leg, which made everyone laugh. My ant-paranoia is not just paranoia. I've been trying not to scratch at real and phantom itches all day! It didn't help that during one of the medical lectures today we talked about different types of skin problems including lice, fleas, etc.!
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