A Cockroach Too Far

The hole where the cockroaches emerge from.


One of the biggest fears of a new Peace Corps volunteer is the legendary hot season, stretching from March into June. “It’s so hot you can’t move,” seasoned veterans tell the rookies. “All can you do is sweat all day long. The only relief is death.” But there is one silver lining to the misery: The insect population can’t bear the heat either, and virtually disappears for four months.

“But the bugs aren’t so bad here,” the new volunteer might protest.

Just wait, is the response. Just wait until the rainy season.

Along with the flourishing of green grass and cereal crops, the insects of Burkina come back in full force with the rains. We lack most of the exotic insects of more tropical climates, the dung and rhinoceros beetles and other fodder for National Geographic documentaries. Instead, our bugs are of the more mundane types, familiar pests to all Americans: ants, termites, mosquitoes, flies, and cockroaches. The difference is in Africa there is no escape from them; people are forced to live in close association with the entire lot.

The ants come in all varieties, small, large, black, red, ants that bite and ants that fly, ants that harvest seeds and ants that scavenge the carcasses of dead cockroaches in my courtyard (more on that later). Mercifully absent from this area are the safari, or driver ants found over much of the rest of the continent, that travel in thick columns and, when disturbed, have a habit of running up a person’s leg and all biting at the exact same time. When it happens, you can’t get your pants off quickly enough, regardless of social decorum. Fortunately, the ants of Burkina qualify only as a minor nuisance, and not a true menace.

The same goes for their cousins, the termites. They have an annoying way of building their mud tunnels up the side of houses and walls. You can knock the tunnels down every day, and commit genocide on the population with an insecticide, but without fail they are back the next morning. Left alone they can destroy wooden support beams, not to mention cause a huge mess, so the fight must go on.

However, there are many who consider the termites a treat, not a problem. After a rain, droves of larges, winged types emerge from the termite mounds and fly towards the light. Villagers take advantage of the pilgrimage to ambush them with lanterns, snatch hundreds out of the air, and fry them up with a little big of salt for flavor. Unfortunately, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend the snack. They’re not terrible, but there’s not much to them—it’s kind of like eating salted dust.

Mosquitoes, on the other hand, aren’t consumed by humans, but instead feed on our blood for their subsistence. Burkina is home to the anopheles mosquito, who announce themselves with an annoying high pitched whine and leave an itchy welt after they bite. The real problem, of course, is the disease they leave behind, the destructive falciparum strand of malaria, which infects between 500 million and a billion people worldwide each year, and kills over a million. By far the biggest impact of the disease is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the endemic poverty makes it difficult for people to afford preventative measures like mosquito nets, or curative medicine after the diseases is contracted. Numerous efforts are underway to combat the scourge, from net and drug distribution to more creative tactics such as genetically engineering malaria resistant mosquitoes, but to this day malaria remains the greatest public health problem in tropical countries across the globe, including Burkina Faso.

Peace Corps volunteers have the benefit of modern prophylaxis drugs to protect us from malaria, and we will inevitably answer that it is the flies that bother us in Burkina far more than the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are only out at night, and their bites disappear after a few hours. Flies, though, have a huge advantage in numbers and persistence. The rainy season is sometimes referred to the fly season, and with good reason. Take an eye off your beer for a split second and you find dozens crawling around inside the rim. The spectacle of hundreds swarming on a piece of raw meat waiting to be sold in the market is positively grotesque. It is rare, during the season, to not have at least five or six crawling around your feet, arms, head, any exposed skin, which will land over and over and over again no matter how many times they are shooed away. Occasionally two will land stuck together, their buzzing amplified in carnal ecstasy, leaving who knows what behind on your skin. Worse is the knowledge that they are doubtless fresh from an open latrine, bearing all the germs and diseases found within.

Flies aren’t the worst thing that comes out of the latrines, however. That prize is reserved for the most revolting insect of them all, the cockroach. Born and raised in human waste, the creatures lay dormant in the daytime, only to emerge by the dozen at night, covering the latrine floor and walls. They are so many and so fast that to mount an offensive against the population is futile, and often counterproductive. Indeed, one of my latrine walls is cracked and crumbling, the result of an overzealous kick- and I didn’t even kill the thing. The only solution is an uneasy truce- I leave them alone, and try not to use the latrine at night except in dire emergencies. If they venture out beyond the walls into my courtyard, or worse, my house, it is an instant death sentence, squashed under my flip-flop, to be portioned off and carried away by opportunistic ants before the morning.

As bad as the cockroaches can be, however, I’ve come across nothing as dire as mentioned by Graham Green in Journey Without Maps, an account of his trek across Liberia in the 1930s (quoting Sir Henry Johnston):

“’These insects,’ he wrote, ‘do not hesitate at night to attack human beings who are asleep. They creep to the corners of the mouth of the sleeping person to suck the saliva. They eat the toe-nails down to the quick, and above all, they gnaw at any sore place or ulcer on the skin . . . the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or three large cockroaches clinging to his lips.’”

It’s enough to make a person long for the hot season.