Keeping the forest at bay

I’m constantly impressed at the tenacity of the forest here in Lodja. Despite our best efforts to carve out a comfortable home here in the Congo bush, I find we’re constantly beating back a seething mass of life conspiring to return our little house and all of its surroundings back into jungle.

The joke here is that you can let a few seeds fall out of your pocket just about anywhere, and they’ll grow. I can personally attest to the ostensible fertility, as I cut down new palm saplings every morning that have sprung up overnight in my garden, trying to give my foreign vegetables and herbs a chance to grow.

I suppose it all starts with the rain. A couple of weeks ago, I experienced the biggest storm (that wasn’t part of a hurricane or a tornado) of my life, pounding Lodja for more than 2 hours one afternoon. I’m kicking myself for not bringing a rain gauge, as I’m really curious about how much rain fell. Click on the picture below for a quick video.

Click for a quick video of the storm.

It’s also funny how quickly it can just disappear. We had a party at our house a while back, which emptied our rainwater tank. And just like that, the rain stopped – nothing more than a drizzle for almost two weeks. Fortunately, we had a big soaking yesterday, so we don’t have to buy water every couple of days. Speaking of, water is not cheap here, even here in the middle of the rainforest, though that’s mostly due to the physical labor it takes to actually transport it. While our monthly water bill in California typically ran between $15-25, we’ve been paying about $3.30 for two days worth of water.

This tiny little guy was waiting right by my toothbrush the other night.

For some perspective, here’s the size of my toothbrush holder next to a dollar bill.

That rain and the myriad rivers it carves this country with lead to a proliferation of life like I’ve never seen, and they’re all eager to move in with us it seems. Spiders and scorpions make nightly appearances, as do cockroaches – though our little cat usually takes care of them quickly. There have been some beautiful grasshoppers, but unfortunately their erratic motion is just too much to resist. The cat adds them to her diet as well, leaving our front porch looking like a prosthetic clinic with all the legs left behind.

The frogs this morning at “Lac Lodja” (really just a big puddle that I’m convinced has something to do with the town’s malaria epidemic) were garrulous, perhaps exploiting the flooded reeds at the puddle’s edge for some fraternization. Toads, too, come for the bounty that our little solar-powered front porch light affords. Congo is truly Lepidopteran heaven, whether you like to eat butterflies and moths, or just see them.

Though I wasn’t brave enough to stick my hand in the picture, that’s about how big she was.

But, with a nod to E.O. Wilson, I’m most impressed with the ants. Whether it’s the tiny buggers – almost microscopic – that nonetheless can pack a “pinch” as it were, or the seamlessly organized bands that get into our food – I’m annoyed, but  I’ve got to hand it to them. When we first got here, a rat got into my open backpack (my fault) and chewed through the lid of one of our two jars of peanut butter.

The tell-tale rodent’s teeth marks, the left behind shards of plastic, and the damn thing didn’t even eat very much of the peanut butter. To an ant that sort of messy pilfering bush league, amateur hour. (We still had to throw out the peanut butter – from 2000-2009, DRC had more instances of plague – yes, bubonic plague – than anywhere else in the world by far.)

La Vache qui rit

In a recent cleaning frenzy, I went through each of our cabinets one by one searching for the source of ants that scattered and disappeared when they sensed my presence and yet I knew were there. I picked up an open package of Laughing Cow cheese, like the one pictured above. Known the world over with almost Twinkie-like notoriety for its stability in all sorts of climates, and it’s pretty tasty too when it’s all you’ve got, “La Vache qui rit” is a staple in just about every ex-pat household on the continent.

But this package lacked its usually oily heft. Still, no signs of foul play. The disc, though it had been opened as I said, still had the top sitting neatly on its base. But when I opened it, the two pie piece-shaped segments tumbled into the air, light as feathers. I picked one up to inspect it: Two neat puncture holes in each, nothing more, and each piece was entirely devoid of cheese. They didn’t even smell like Laughing Cow any more, licked clean in a way that would make any grandmother proud.

Like I said, can’t help but be impressed…