Botfly day

June 18th, 2008

They wake up at 4:30 in the morning to the sound of Maama’s whistle. They immediately start to do their chores. Marvin begins to sweep with the broom that is a short bundle of dry grass, the sun isn’t even up. We woke up with them this morning, hiding a camera in their room to get a shot of their morning ritual. They make their beds, mop the floor, sweep, cook breakfast for themselves and clean up before putting on their uniforms and walking an hour or two to school.

I finished a painting of the house, spent time drawing up the lesson plans for the day and editing pictures.

I took a few portraits of some of the children while we ate lunch and then worked some more after this.

Around 5:00 I began teaching perspective and I gave them a template for a pattern to make. I took a break while they were working to go outside to photograph the younger ones playing dodgeball and I went inside and found Kuda on Jah-Jah’s lap and she was attempting to squeeze something out of his neck. My first thought was: botfly, and low and behold there it was sticking its head to the surface to breathe. They were sprinkling salt and sugar on it to try to get it to come out. For those of you that don’t know what a botfly larvae is : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botfly

So, they’re nasty. One of my friends Kelly a couple months ago told me she had one while she was in Kenya so I had done some research on them and I knew that one thing you don’t do is try and squeeze it out while it’s still alive. So I gather ducttape and superglue to suffocate it to get it out. By this time Kuda is almost passed out because of how much pain he is in (the larvae have barbs on the outside of their skin to hold them inside and when squeezed it’s excruciating for the ‘host,’ in this case, Kuda) So we dust away the leftover salt and sugar and wait for the ducttape to do it’s duty. After twenty minutes we remove it and the thing has stopped moving. So we go in with tweezers and pull it out. Ugh, with a sickening pop it comes out of this huge hole in his skin. His eyes are rolled into the back of his head because of how much pain he is in. Cathy holds the botfly and the rest of the kids all gather around to gawk at it. Kuda is just laying there, still quasi-passed out, clutching a coke that’s supposed to make him feel better. I felt so bad for him.

I helped Cathy crack some eggs and she was surprised to see that I could crack them with my hands, she said she had never seen anyone do it the way I had. Some of the kids came in asking for help with their homework so we talked about the different types of clouds and how to spell the word “utensil.”

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