Ants. They're what's for dinner.

A series of insect photos revealed themselves to me, and considering the large part bugs play in my Malawian life--mosquitos and hallucination-inducing mephloquin, bed bugs, spiders, weevils, and termites--one post should be devoted to them. Be warned. These are large bugs. These photos are perhaps not for the faint of heart.

Large dragonfly thing.

Millipede nearly as long as my shoe. I'm a size twelve, by the way.

Yellow-spotted ant.

Weird, big thing that must remain unidentified.

In rainy season, flying ants come out of the ground like the walking dead. I hear them plowing into my tin roof once the sun goes down. Bing. Bing. Bing. Malawians find them less annoying. In fact, they find them delicious. They're harvested using a flashlight, two buckets, and water. They come to the light; you drown them in a bucket of water and then put them in another bucket for storage. Fry them in oil. Add some salt. Mmm mmm good. Kind of. It's kind of like eating a flavorless potato chip.

My students could see the disgust on my face when they yelled over, "Tikulya!" (We're eating!) and wanted to know if we eat ants in America. Well, no we don't. But they wanted to know why, and the best answer I could fish up was that we think it's uncivilized. In hindsight, I should have just said that we have a lot of chicken. Here they are: