If you think there is something crawling on you...

... then there probably is.

I was talking with another volunteer about how nice it is that here in Mcar there isn’t really much to worry about in the way of poisonous creatures. It actually makes me (slightly) less jumpy knowing that all the creepy-crawlies that pop up everywhere are mostly just harmful to their dinner. However, this does not mean that they keep to themselves. There are some bugs here that are REALLY annoying, even though “harmless.”

            The first are grossest. They also caused me quite some trouble during my learning curve about local bugs. Here they go by “parasy,” but I think our medical book has an English name for them too (if that means they exist somewhere off this island I’ll be sad). They are a sort of little flea that finds somewhere soft-ish on your foot, burrows in, and then balloons up with her eggs. Ahhhhhh.

            Having been warned about them during training, I asked my neighbors what they looked like, and they said that only the white ones actually go in. Well, I have yet to see a white one, but ten black ones later I can tell you that the black ones go in too. Maybe I misunderstood?

            The first time I found one was at night so I couldn’t get my neighbors to help. I spent nearly 2 full hours digging 6 (!) out of my toes; there is a technique to it, but I didn’t yet know it. After that I got much better at recognizing them early on, before they have gotten so huge and bothersome. Still not my favorite, but I am now an obsessive foot washer/watcher so I catch them when they are still on the surface.

            The second bug is my current dilemma. I don’t really know what it is, but they are really tiny, and for a while I had no idea what was getting me. I thought maybe I had bed bugs or fleas. Well, really maybe that’s what these are, I have no idea. They live in the dirt, making them completely unavoidable. I have picked them out of the dirt on two separate occasions and asked two different people what they are and if they bite. The answers were the same: I don’t know what they are called, but they only live on chickens, not people, and they don’t bite.

            I guess I’m a chicken. Working in my garden (the empty space that will be my garden) leads to a full-body bug hunt down, no matter how hard I try to keep an eye on my ankles to catch any making their way up off my feet. The thing is that it’s really really hard to see them, so lots make it past my surveillance.

            As for no biting? I can’t say that I have seen them actually in the act, but I have caught them near the site of a fresh bite and, most incriminating of all, swollen with blood.

            These little pests are just that, and I’m still figuring out a system to deal with them. Obviously I’m either extra sensitive or somehow attract them specifically, because no one else has a problem with them. Hopefully I’m just a buggy novelty item and soon it will wear off.

This is a parasy with the hole it came from: