The Army Is Coming

Life in the Darien was slow-moving and peaceful. There always seemed to be something that needed doing around the house, and we always were working on dreaming up the “next project.” Visitors to our house were frequent, whether it was Chocó coming down the river from one of the Indian villages, or people coming out to the house by foot from town. We were definitely a curiosity to everyone.
One morning Diego burst into the house, waking everyone up in a passionate rush, screaming that we had to leave. He kept shouting "the army is coming." When we didn't understand he took us to the door and pointed across the cleared out area between the side of the house and the gully. The army he spoke of was ants. They were advancing in a huge hoard, marching in a straight horizontal line that was at least 100 feet across, and that went back as far as the back of the cleared area, all the way to the gully and the Mercadeo. There had to be many millions (maybe billions) of them covering the ground like a rippling blanket. You could see numerous insects and small rodents running for their lives just in front of the advancing hoard. We quickly gathered a few things together and immediately left the house by dugout canoe and went into town for a few hours.
When we got back, the ants were all gone, and the house was spotless - easily the cleanest that it had been since being newly built! Every crumb, every scrap, every little dead insect or piece of anything not nailed down was gone! We decided to have them in once a month to clean the house, but they never came back.
When I first went down to Darien, it was all about the animals. Whenever someone came across something interesting, they would bring it to us. We had a young Toucan brought to us (you know, the Fruit Loops bird) that had a very distinctive personality. We let it roam free around the main house, and it hopped around, following all of us everywhere like a puppy. It made a cute little clicking noise with its beak when petted behind the ears (birds have ears?) in the same manner that a cat purrs. It lived with us, loose in the house, for well over a year.
We also had a pair of baby 'gato solo' (translation: lone cat) or as we refer to them, coati mundi. They were very cute and cuddly and roamed freely around the house. The toucan was a curiosity to them, but basically they left each other alone. They look like little racoons with a long snout. They were curious about everything, just like a raccoon. They lived with us at least a couple of years and we nicknamed them the Little Bears. The Bread Girls would sit for hours playing with the two gato solo.
In the kitchen we always had a bunch or two of hanging bananas. There were three kinds of bananas, and they got sweeter as they got smaller. The platano is the largest, big and mealy. Platano is eaten at every meal and it is debatable whether it is a fruit or a vegetable. The second is the 'guineo' or what we refer to as a regular banana that you buy in the local grocery store. The third is the finger banana, which never gets more than a few inches long (the length of one of your fingers) and is very sweet. We also always had a large stack of platanos on the floor in the kitchen. These were on our primary menu and they were also on the menu for the animals.
In addition to the platanos and hanging bananas we always had sacks of whatever was in season (papayas, mangos, avocados, etc.). The kids would pick them growing wild and bring them to us. We generally paid one dollar per 100. Yeah, you heard me right, fresh picked mangos and avocados for 1 cent apiece.
There are numerous different kinds of mangos, and each has a different taste and consistency. Some varieties are mealy, some are stringy, some have the consistency of a peach and some a harder texture like that of a pineapple. They have named the varieties after the fruit that tastes like that particular mango; for example mango de papaya, mango de guava, and mango de pina.
Unfortunately the fruit in the house also brought unwanted animals. The most frequent visitors were bats (vile, ugly creatures) which would come into the house at night to eat our fruit. There are two kinds of bats living in the Darien; fruit bats and vampire bats. The vampire bats feed entirely on blood, and generally take advantage of sleeping cattle and horses, but they are reputed to feed on humans as well. They do not cause any immediate harm to their victims when feeding, but they carry numerous diseases that can be very dangerous.
I remember one night, when the bats became so numerous flying around the house, that we took drastic measures. We set up a mist net, the same kind we used to trap parrots, across the kitchen. We caught a lot of bats but didn't completely solve the problem. We finally solved the bat dilemma by screening over every hole around the bottom of the roof of the house.