Last Saturday, November 2, we officially entered the rainy season. I heard the steady patter of raindrops begin at about 4:00 am. By 8:00 am we had dual waterfalls cascading off the interior rooflines. A river was running through the center of our common space and out under the French doors. The important parts of the house were dry – the bed, couch and dining table – but for how long, we didn’t know. John vowed to get Lewa to fix our roof. I suggested we buy a good floor squeegee, put a plastic tarp over the bed and live with it.

That was five days ago. It has rained every day since; not steadily but certainly for multiple hours a day. Lewa maintenance came and patched half our roof on Tuesday so now our interior water features have slowed from streams to drips and we’re reasonably confident our sleeping quarters will stay dry. What we weren’t prepared for was how fast everything springs to life with moisture.

Within a day, the brittle, gray-brown landscape had taken on a pale green hue. If you looked closely, nearly every stalk of grass had a single green leaf jutting from the top. What looked like long dead acacia trees had tufts of new shoots springing out along their branches. Four days later the hills and plains are transformed.

Along with the burgeoning green outside, we began noticing a change inside. When we first arrived, we found three cans of “Doom Power Gard Insect Spray” and, until now, wondered why they were here. For seven weeks we’ve had very little trouble with bugs. A few moths would batter themselves against the lights every night and there was the occasional fly, spider and mosquito, but nothing particularly annoying. Throughout the week, though, the number and variety of moths, beetles and all forms of winged insects has been growing. And then there was last night…

The generator came on at 6:15 and we had one light on in the house; the one over the dining table. By 7:00 pm we were staring at a tornado of bugs swirling in a cone between the light and the table. Dead bugs – little black ones the size of grains of rice, inch-long ones with gossamer wings, plump beetles on their backs with their legs in the air and moths galore – were piling up on the table. Insects were crawling on the floor, landing on the furniture and fluttering against the windows. My glowing computer screen had little bug armies marching across my wallpaper photos of grandkids and sunsets. Where had they come from? We suspect eggs in the roof were just waiting for moisture to hatch.

About 7:30 pm we remembered the “Doom Power Gard” and released a cloud into the storm of insects. That accelerated the death spirals under the light but hardly put a dent in the population in the rest of the house. We ate in the dark and took refuge under our mosquito netting.

This morning I awoke at a little after 5:00 am to the sound of munching and chewing. I peered into the gloom and saw a very large black mass right outside our flimsy glass doors. A 2,000 lb. cape buffalo stood about eight feet from the end of our bed ripping grass from our doorstep. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to charge into the room, but woke John up nevertheless. The buffalo took off as soon as he heard our voices.

When the electricity came on at 6:00, I went out to investigate the bug situation. Not one, not two but three full dustpans of carcasses later, we’d swept up most of them. Today we’re going to Nakumatt (if it stops raining and we can negotiate the roads) to buy more “Doom.”