White ants for dinner

Today I saw a line in a resume/CV that read "can resist thirst and hunger". This is Sudan. His name is David and he is one of the people I work closely with here. For those of you who know as much as I knew six months ago about South Sudan (in other words very little) let me describe the story of most of the people I meet here so you can better understand the quote above. The southern half of Sudan was at war for 21 years both with each other and with the North. Most of the young men in the South fled to Ethiopia and eventually many ended up in Uganda or Kenya at refugee camps. They are the so-called "lost boys" because they were separated from their families and are, in some cases, still to this day looking for their family members. I could go on, but that is the really short version of the story. I guess I was just trying to give some background for now. This is actually the first time I'm writing from my site (Kauda), in the Nuba Mountains region of Sudan, a contested area between the North and the South, which has been administratively divided 55% North, 45% South, but nobody really knows what that means. I'm here with an NGO, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), sleeping in their compound, which is actually not what you might imagine a compound to be like: a few sticks have been put around the property (an area of about 7.5 acres if that means anything to you) to protect the "vegetable garden" from goats and other animals coming in, but this "fence" has been eaten up by termites, so there isn't much of a fence left; even though the total staff here is over a dozen people (all Sudanese) only 4 of us sleep here: the guard, the program manager (Waru), the finance guy (Lassu), and myself; we don't have tents, but we sleep in rooms with mosquito nets, which, more than anything, are meant to protect us from the scorpions that might fall from the ceiling. It rains almost every day here, and there aren't any roads, which means you just follow the tracks of another vehicle and make your way around the trees and shrubs that way. (apparently all the land mines have been removed) The only thing that is smooth and looks like a road is actually a river bed that is all dried up, but apparently floods as soon as it rains and the water comes rushing down from the hills. Jeeps, tractors, and motorcycles are the only vehicles that will get through the mud, although they sometimes have trouble crossing rivers since "in the Nuba Mountains there are rivers, but there aren't bridges". Recently, coming back from somewhere, the staff was stuck in the vehicle for 6 hours, surrounded by water on all sides. Luckily there aren't any wild animals in the area, but there are many iguana-like purple and orange lizards roaming around as weird-looking wasps fly about and snakes find their way on the ground. At night the real "wildlife" comes out. Frogs, worms, scorpions, geckos, mosquitos, grasshoppers, spiders, and apparently there are these bugs called "white ants". White ants are not ants, nor are they white in fact. They are more like thin beetles with white wings. They only come out sometimes in the evening after the rain, and Wednesday I was lucky enough to see them. It was around 8 pm when we turned on our solar lamp. In a few seconds there were dozens of these bugs flying towards the lamp. I thought it was pretty disgusting, but Lassu rejoiced! He moved the lamp outside the room, ran to get a big basin which had a little water in it, and placed the basin in front of the lamp. The basin started to fill with these "white ants" as he called them, and soon I was also crouched down grabbing these bugs in flight and throwing them into the 2 basins (one was not proving enough so we had to fetch a second). When, the plague was over, Lassu proclaimed "We will soak them tonight, take their wings off in the morning, fry them, and have them for dinner"... and so we did.