So this one time, I ate bugs.

My nine year-old host sister burst through the door, a flurry of flying skirt and swinging shoelaces, tumbling over my backpack, vaulting over the coffee table, and shouting (in the loudest voice I've heard her use since I've been here), "MAMA! The kumbi-kumbi!"



"Ai-ya!" A moment before, my mama had been crouched over a pot of boiling water, watching the swirling grains of rice with a glazed-over look in her eyes. But now with a single hand-clap she was up, wiping her hands on her skirt and handing my sister a stainless steel bowl. "Loveness, go! Hurry!"



My sister Loveness (nine years old, sixty-five pounds of pure charisma, and known by everyone as Love or Love-oo) pulled me up from the couch on her way out the door, and we sprinted out of the dormitory and across the breezeway, coming to a screeching halt at the edge of the soccer field. It was about 7 in the evening, slightly after sunset on this side of the world, when the last light dances its way past the banana trees -- and apparently just when the kumbi-kumbi start to come out.



"Wait, Love, what's kumbi-kumbi?"



A silly question, apparently: "These!"



And then I saw them -- a mass of insects with bodies the size of quarters and wings like transparent dollar-bills, floating lazily under the flourescent porch-light, flitting in and out of the darkness that lay just beyond the cement. They reminded me of oversized mayflies, similar to the ones I had seen every summer along the Mississippi River. They had the same lethargic, light-seeking habits, the same miniscule lifespan, the same night-time activities -- but they were about three or four times bigger than any bug I'd seen in the U.S. And now Love was scooping them up one by one, snatching them by a wing or a leg and tossing them in the bowl, where they spiraled and struggled in the half-inch of water.



"Wait, but why are we catching them?"



Another silly question, apparently: "To eat them, of course!"



A dumbfounded pause. "...are we going to cook them first?"



"We can fry them if you want to, but we don't have to. Joshua, show her!" Love, by this point, had about twenty kumbi-kumbi struggling to escape between the gaps in her fingers, and was in no position to show me anything.



My thirteen year-old brother was dangling a kumbi-kumbi by his ear, listening to the hum of its wings as he pinched it between his thumb and index finger. Within seconds he had discarded the wings and popped the body in his mouth, proudly explaining, "My Baba showed me how to do that."



Another astounded pause.



It took a few moments for me to adjust to the process -- not because kumbi-kumbi are hard to catch (they're not), but because the process of catching them also involves throwing them in a pot of water and leaving them to drown. Even as a mostly reformed vegetarian, even with oversized mayflies, this was hard to watch. There was also the more practical matter of avoiding all of the other insects lurking in the soil beneath our feet -- most importantly, the multitudes of swarming, bright red ants, which would occasionally latch onto the toes of unsuspecting humans. The females, my brother explained, are harmless; the males, however, are fearless and vicious, armed with bulldog-ish jaws that snap onto anything that moves.

"See! They're not even afraid!" Joshua said as he pointed a mud-encrusted index finger into one ant's path. Like a miniature pit bull, it charged and locked on, latching its jaws onto a pad of flesh and just hanging there, dangling.

Within an hour, our little bowl swirled with about one hundred kumbi-kumbi, all squirming and sopping wet. We presented them to my mama (who profusely hugged and thanked us), and watched them tumble into a big pot.

After being fried and salted, the kumbi-kumbi were presented to us on a platter, with wings still intact, and the whole family waited for me to take the first bite. And so I did -- choosing a particularly small, one-winged specimen. Within a few moments, I was picking larger, juicer kumbi, and by the end of the meal I had eaten twenty or thirty.

When trying a new food, it's natural to try to make parallels to other culinary experiences, but with kumbi-kumbi this is a bit of a challenge. Was it good? Yes. Would I eat it again? Sure. Would I make it in the United States? Probably not. If pressed to describe it, though, I'd say that it had the texture of a salty rice krispie kernel, with a soggy moist inside (and maybe a bit of shrimp-like outer shell).

My brother Joshua had other ideas: "See! It tastes just like chicken!"

From the Swali Box

For the past week I've been teaching at an HIV/AIDS day camp, working with a classroom of about 44 students, most of whom are only a few years younger than me and have had essentially no sex education at all. One of our most treasured classrom rituals is the daily reading of the "Swali Box," which is a time for answering the students' anonymous questions (swali, in Kiswahili, means "question"). Here's the best of the best:

- If a woman who is HIV positive has sex with a dog, can the dog get HIV/AIDS?
- Why is your skin white? Why is my skin black?
- What's a lesbian?
- Have you ever had sex? If so, what does it feel like?
- Why do women want to be equal to men? Don't they know they're physically weaker?
- I'm in love with a boy, but he doesn't love me back. What should I do?
- What are the biological effects of being in love?
- I just have a comment: the correct name for a mother's first breastmilk is colostrum.