Bee My Valentine or a Bug's Life (whichever is the cheesier title)

Now for the bee story.  Approximately 5 minutes of my life so bizarre that I could scarcely process nor recall it for hours afterward.  I was working with the Education team at a school called Nyasese, a very small and very, very rural school.  It has a big beautiful field with a big beautiful tree set right in the middle.  All of my teammates love this tree, but one even more than the rest.  Pamela is not only a colleague, but a good friend, and the mother of six of my other closest friends.  I joined her in the afternoon under the shade of that gorgeous tree. 

Before I go on, I have to point out that I’ve noticed that students often want to follow the mzungu (white person/me), so when we divide up classes into smaller groups, I do my best to make it completely impossible to guess which group I will follow until the last possible second.  We split the kids into two groups.  One to stay inside, the other to go under the tree.  I leaned casually against the wall as though I wasn’t going anywhere though I had already arranged to join my teammate outside.  Two boys who thought they were much sneakier than they actually were, zipped across the room and joined the group staying inside.  Once the other group was out the door, I turned and made my move.  About ten seconds later these boys came bounding past me to join the group they’d originally been assigned to.

We reached the tree, the lesson began, all was right in the world.  I sat back a few feet from the group.  Close enough to listen, but far enough away to not distract or to very obviously see when they were paying attention to me rather than the lesson.  After about 40 minutes, I noticed a few of them glancing up in the tree.  Then Pamela was doing it to.  I tried to figure out what was grabbing their attention.  And then I heard it.  A low hum.  Very low, but you could somehow tell it was big.  Every 20 seconds or so it grew a decibel louder and then…the dark cloud appeared.  This cloud, however, was not way up in the sky; it was coming out from within the tree branches themselves.  It was big and dark and full of smaller things that were still somehow big and dark….and moving rapidly.

Bees.  Thousands of them, for some reason disturbed from a hidden nest.  Buzzing and swarming and moving collectively and quickly towards us.  ‘Take the kids, Pamela,’ I said low and quietly.  I wanted them as far away from danger as possible.  She tried to put on a calm face for the kids, but the mask broke every few seconds as the cloud neared and I could see her panicked eyes.  ‘Pamela, GO!’  I was too far back from the group, an outlier.  I didn’t feel like moving was a very good idea.  Unfortunately, as I racked my brain for the correct response to this situation, I couldn’t recall a single tidbit of information as to what to do in such circumstances.  ‘Should we lie down?’ said Pamela, her voice quiet and wavering, ‘I think we are supposed to lie on the ground.’  I replied that I didn’t know, but already it was too late to safely make it to the school building, so yes, let’s move slowly, get as low as possible and say perfectly still. 

The boys who had run out to join our group were the same two who were panicking the most.  One of them cried out that he was too afraid; he was going to make a run for it.  Pamela looked at him, stern and calm.  In Kiswahili, she said, ‘If you run, they are all going to chase you and ignore us.  You are going to stay very still.’  At the end of her sentence, they were upon us.  No one spoke a word, no one moved.  I would be surprised if we even remembered to breathe.  As low to the ground as we were and as high as the cloud extended, we still felt their big, furry bodies striking our faces, our hair, our skin.  Pop, pop, pop, pop.  So many direct hits and yet, by some miracle, without the stings I braced myself for.  I didn’t react, no matter how forcefully they struck, just stayed perfectly still, like a corpse.  I felt if I even drew a breath, I would pull them in closer. 

At first, I shut my eyes (the idea of getting stung in the eye was not so enticing, so I figured I would cover the one part of me I could), but curiosity won me over.  When I slowly lifted the lids of my eyes and peeked out, I could see it.  A hurricane of thick black dots, reminding me of both the manic movements of subatomic particles in quantum theory and of one of my favorite phenomenon by one of my favorite animals (a murmuration of starlings), which it is one of my life goals to witness before I die. (Check one out and we can hunt them down together!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k&feature=related)

The thing about starlings is they stay pretty well above the ground, whereas the bees were hitting it full on.  You don’t have to worry about a thousand beaks smashing into you as you are well below the birds, whereas the thought of what a thousand African bee stingers would do to us, especially to the children was unimaginable.  A murmuration of starlings inspires in one a sense of awe at the stark and powerful beauty of nature without any of the terror.  And yet, there we were, in the midst of countless agitated bees full of fear and wonder.  But mostly fear.

I can’t rightly say just how long it lasted.  It was one of those things that felt it may have gone on for years or mere moments, where all your senses are on high alert, where you see, smell, hear, feel everything as your mind tries to decide, fight or flight, what inputs will help us reach this decision.  Suspended in time, watching a living cloud envelope us.  It was one of the craziest yet most amazing things have ever seen. 

As it passed, we saw it move collectively and intact across the open field to the woods on the other side.  We all just looked at each other in disbelief.  No one spoke.  The school bell rang.  Five minutes until they needed to head home for lunch.  And then I heard it.  That same low hum.  They were coming back. I squinted over the field, but saw the cloud continuing to move away.  It made no sense.  The sound was getting louder and closer.  That is when I turned around and saw a whole new group coming out of the opposite side of the tree.  It was still quite high in the branches and the kids were on the far side of the tree from it, closer to the school.  Pamela told them to make a run for it and they shot off full-speed.  I started to follow, but Pamela was gathering her things.  ‘Leave them. I’ll come back for them,’ I said.  She looked up uncertainly, then over at the long distance we would have to traverse to find any cover, then back at her things.  When she looked up at me again, she gasped, ‘Oh dear.’ I turned around and saw the rest of our team moving towards us.  They love taking lunch under our favorite tree.  We didn’t want to make any sudden movements, as the cloud was descending quickly now and we’d wasted too much time in thought.  I moved slowly in their direction, making small and tight movements to say ‘NO’ and ‘GO BACK.’  Across the distance they squinted, shouted, and kept moving towards us.  Finally they understood, scratched their heads and went back the other way. 

We feared we were stuck again, this time standing upright, making taller more accessible targets.  However, this cloud began to follow the last.  First it moved toward us, but then past without encasing us.  We looked at each other, speechless once more and walked slowly, carefully, and wordlessly dazed to join the others for lunch.

The very next day, I was doing dishes with a colleague after dinner.  I stepped outside in the dark to poor out some water, and when I came in felt a stinging sensation on my foot.  A huge safari ant with a mean bite.  My friend Janine came to assist us in the clean up.  She was sweeping up the kitchen and as she swept the debris out the back door, switched on the light.  She yelled for us to come look.  The porch was swarming with biting safari ants.  The further we examined, the more we saw, until we noticed an empty oil can sitting at the back, covered in ants.  We went inside and checked the shower along that wall.  Ants everywhere!  Then the bathroom next door.  More ants! We grabbed the gasoline (they hate gasoline) and began boiling as much water as we could in both of our kitchens.  I came bounding up the stairs with oven mitts on and a kettle of scalding water in each hand, targeting any little spot that moved.  We moved from the porch to the kitchen to the shower to the bathroom on our murderous (ant-) rampage before we had cleared the lot.  Of course, they were back the next day, but so were the kettles.  Even today, as I write this, I am being tormented by a huge pitch black wasp with a bright orange flame-colored butt who seems to be obsessed with the scent of the shampoo I used today.  I keep having to run out and grab the broom to try to drive it out the window, but it just goes around the house and finds another way back in.  The excitement never ends around here.

Hope you had an equally enthralling Valentine’s Day/week.  Love from Kenya, Jessica