Ear bugs

So, the last time I blogged, I mentioned the ear bugs. They are tiny little bugs with four wings each, and they came to Gracias when I was in town last week. When I left town to come up to Villa Verde, however, they weren't here, so I figured they didn't come this high up the mountain. Well, I was wrong... they arrived tonight. Jacki, Julia and I were just finishing dinner in the kitchen when we noticed that outside there were thousands, literally thousands, of small black bugs in the air. Then they started to come into the kitchen, through every crack in the wall and hole in the window.

They are small bugs (maybe 1 cm long long) and they each have four wings. They fly around and then shed their wings, which land everywhere, and then the body of the bug just starts going on the land. They're pretty horrible, because their wings get all over everything (in food, in dishes, in our hair, on our clothes, in our drinks) and then the creepy crawly things are everywhere too.

The worst part about them, though, is that they nest in people's ears. They crawl deep into people's ears, trying to burrow as far in as they can. Julia's students told her that if they get in there, people hear an unbearable buzzing sound in their ear, and they have to go immediately to the hospital. So, we have been walking around our houses with toilet paper stuffed in our ears so that the creepy bugs don't get in. Agh. And in the meantime, we have to keep cleaning up everything, rewashing our dishes, and shaking out our clothes and hair to make sure we don't have wings or bugs in them. Get me home.