At first we wanted to write a post about all the nice fruits we eat every day. A life to dream about. Fruit in abundance, sunshine, and a porch on which you can sit at sunset with a nice glass of wine. Mmmm, nope not really. Fruit, yes; sunshine, yes; and yes, also a porch. Romantic? No, unless you want to hide under a mosquito net.

We admit, we love the sunshine (if it is not too hot, that is). We enjoy the spacious porch for the children to play on. It becomes more bothering if you need to pay attention to all the bugs. During the day we have the tiger-mosquitoes and during the night the mosquitoes species which give you Malaria. Than, the spiders.

At the moment our porch is home of a huge one. Her bite, we’ve been told, is just as painful as a sting of a scorpion (yes, we have those too). We have a love/hate relation with the spider. She keeps the mosquitoes and other flying stingy critters at bay.

Another annoying bug is the sand-flea (jigger). This bug crawls under your skin (literally) and lays it eggs there while feeding on your blood. The children all had their share and this time it was Jurgen’s turn. Two of these ‘cute’ creatures dug a nice hole in his little toe. The trick is to remove them completely with egg-sag still attached. Simple starting to dig in with a needle is a bad idea. Most likely the egg-sag will get damaged and will cause a mess. Slowly cutting open the skin around the sag works best. The first one on Jurgen’s toe came out as a whole, the second one tore open but still came out reasonably well. With the egg-sag still attached, the sand-flea could be studied under the mini-microscope. It gave the children a nice chance to see it up close. It was hard to get a focus as the sand-flea constantly tried to move away from the light.

To live here has its advantages when it come to learning or experiencing new stuff… Whether you always want to learn these things is a whole other matter.

For all of you who would like to see the animal we have a little video:

We have place some picture below.
BUT, BE WARNED! THE PICTURE ARE GRAPHIC. YEP, BLOOD IS INCLUDED.
Only scroll down if you don’t mind seeing blood!
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