About a week ago, we all sat down at the table, ready to eat dinner. We thanked God for the food and Mom started serving up. She opened the warmer which contained the noodles and was quite surprised to find that there were about half a dozen small pin-head sized beetles already there. They weren’t in any shape to fight for their food, since they had just been boiled for several minutes and steamed inside the warmer. We deduced that they had been in the bag of noodles the whole time and that our older aged cook had just missed seeing them. She served the noodles and told us that if we wanted to pick out the bugs first before we got the sauce we could. Several of us opted for this, but Dad just decided to eat them, bugs and all. He didn’t seem to suffer any stomach problems later.
Around the same time period, when my dad went out to a village to see about an orphan, he found a NASFAM store, which is a store which sells small-holder farmers products. We’ve bought good rice from NASFAM before, so Dad got two bags. When he got home, we examined the rice and noticed that it looked pretty poor, with a few bugs in it here and there, but nothing serious. A few days ago, when we went to fill our rice container for the cook, the bugs were partying, with bugs of all ages invited. We poured out the rice into a flat pan to sort the bugs out, and found bugs in all stages of development, including larvae, worms, medium sized beetles and adults. The adults were about the size of match heads. We surrendered “Operation Extermination” and began “Operation Distribution.” We gave all the rice to the grateful employees, who usually only eat corn flour porridge. They were very thankful for it. When we get back to the States, one thing we won’t miss is the battles with bugs.
Jared Langdon
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