It all started when I first moved to Honduras. Ants seem to have seasons here. Sometimes they are black ants, like we have in the US. Then there were a few months where tiny ants liked certain parts of my walls. Yesterday I noticed huge almost translucent ants. As I came home tonight there was one on the doorstep and I thought, "This must be the season of white ants." The ants have been annoying, but not a real problem except for the time that the leaf cutter ants had a trail across my front door. But that is a story for another time.
Earlier tonight I reached for a drink on my nightstand. Inside were two ants. As I looked closer I noticed the nightstand was covered with ants. I pulled it out from the wall and there were ants everywhere. Some were carrying larvae! At first I thought I must have left some food somewhere. I searched for the source. No ants in the drawers of the nightstand but suddenly there is an ant in my hair. Then another. The ants were falling from the ceiling!
I looked up to see ants crawling out from a loose tile. It was 8:45 pm. I looked outside and saw that Santos and Fany were at home so I called. Santos answered, "Hello Mary Lynn."
"Hi Santos. I have a problem. Ants are falling from my chest (Oops! 'pecho' = chest, 'techo' = roof) every two seconds!" I said.
He didn't laugh, but said he would be right over. He and Fany came quickly. Meanwhile I had moved the bed from under the "leak" in the roof and was spraying everything in sight with ant spray. Fany had me keep Laura in the kitchen away from the fumes while she and Santos tried to figure out what was going on. Santos told me they don't bite. That didn't make me feel much better.
Santos pulled down the ceiling tile where the ants were crawling out. I couldn't look. I was imagining something up there like a bee hive full of ants. He grabbed my headlamp, climbed up a ladder and looked around but found nothing. He took the spray and sprayed everything up there.
Then he tried to put the ceiling tile back. It was broken before he took it off, so it didn't attach tightly. We had swept three times and mopped once, but ants kept appearing. He got nails and screws, but nothing worked. Finally I said, "Paint (pinta), I mean tape (cinta) !!! He looked at me a little strangely but when I came back with duct tape he got the point. We taped the heck out of the ceiling. Fany and I joked that we would tell people it is the new style, to have stripes of duct tape on your ceiling. Then she said we can paint it all white and nobody will know.
Meanwhile Laura was laughing the whole time. Laura will turn one year old on Sunday. She has a gift for laughing the funniest laugh in tense situations. To me, having ants falling on my bed at 9 pm, was a tense situation.
Santos ultimately determined that the ants were coming in through the roof, falling onto the ceiling, and then crawling through the cracked tile to visit me. Good luck getting through the duct tape, ants!
I changed my bedding and cleaned the bedroom from top to bottom. Hopefully I won't have nightmares of translucent ants falling on my head tonight. It will be a good story to tell Lourdes and Jairo tomorrow. I'm sure Jairo will get a laugh out of it. Maybe by then I will laugh be able to laugh about it too. At this point all I can think of is Thank God for Santos and Fany!
