Day 221 - Rain Ants

Every experience in Barbados had a cultural layer to it, even getting to know about the flora and fauna.

The most important task when I first arrived in Barbados was to find a house. Because Barbados was a living quarters allowance post, I had to arrange with real estate agents on the island to see what was available. Unlike real estate agents in the U.S. who worked all day, every day, agents in Barbados worked Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That posed a few challenges since I was also supposed to work those hours on those days.

When one of the local employees in the consular section, Anthony*, told me his uncle had a house for rent and asked if I would like to have his cousin show me the place, I was pleased by the possibility of looking at it after work instead of having to ask my boss if it would be OK for me to take off early to see another property. My boss always wanted more notice than I could give.

Anthony arranged for his cousin to pick me up at the end of the day to take me to the house. It was a wonderful home, but I knew right away that it was too large for me to get it approved. And it was more open than the security officer would like. The house seemed more like two houses, one half consisting of the kitchen, dining room, and living room, with the three bedrooms in the other half. The two halves were joined by a covered porch, screened in on one side and completely open on the other, which served as the family room. In other words, the room where the family was expected to sit around to watch TV was outside.

Anthony's uncle, the owner of the house, was a judge for a Caribbean regional council which required he live on another of the island nations. His cousin had told his father about me, although I kept wondering how he could have had much to say since we hadn't even met, and he kept stressing that his father wanted me to rent his house. He was willing to accept whatever rental amount was my limit in spite of the fact that he could get more for the house if he rented it to tourists during the long tourist season. I kept responding with appreciation for his father's generosity and with compliments about the house, but I knew that I would not be able to rent the house because it was so much larger than was allowable for me. In order to get Anthony's cousin to stop calling me to pressure me into renting his father's house, I finally asked the security officer to check it out to give me the definitive "no" I knew he would.

After that, Anthony seemed much cooler towards me, as though my not pursuing a lease for the house had been embarrassing to him. In fact, my gut was telling me to be leery of any potential landlord who was that eager for me to rent his property when all the other landlords seemed to want nothing to do with Americans from the embassy.

image of ants with wings by wit, via
Flickr.com

Once we moved into our house on the hill, one evening as we were sitting in our living room, watching TV with the French doors leading to the patio open to let in the breeze, we noticed a swarm of bugs flying into the house. They seemed attracted to the lights, so we closed the doors to prevent more from getting in, and we turned off the lights downstairs and headed upstairs to get away from them. The next morning we found one of the walls in the dining room covered with these bugs. There were so many the only way we could think of to deal with them was to spray them with an insecticide and then brush them from the walls and into a dustpan and then dump them into the trash.

That day at the office, all of us Americans commented on this strange scene as we all found large numbers of these winged insects in our home that morning. I mentioned this scene to Anthony and asked if he knew what those insects were. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know anything about such insect swarms.

Since we Americans in the consular section lived all over the island, it was very difficult to believe we had all experienced something Anthony, a native, knew nothing about. I didn't understand why Anthony would pretend he didn't know what they were, but I realized I wouldn't be able to rely on him to give me a straight answer to anything else.

Still curious about these flying pests, I asked our next door neighbors about them. They explained that the insects were called rain ants because they swarmed just before it rained in the evening.  Our neighbors insisted you could smell them before they arrived. When Bajans smelled them, they shut all their doors and windows and turned off the lights until the rain came.

It took us a few more experiences with rain ants before we could recognize their scent. It took me longer than that to come up with a hypothesis for why Anthony would pretend he didn't know what they were.

*a name, not necessarily the right one