Spider Ant

I ate my last mini Hershey’s bar today. That deserves an entry to itself, but I will refrain from moping.

Instead, I will tell of my new arch nemesis, the Spider Ant, apparently also known as the Red Roman, a nasty creature that comes sprinting, not crawling or even creeping, into my house each night just about the time it starts to get dark outside. With the body shape of an ant, but about 90 times bigger, six spider legs and two more in front that it carries aloft like javelins, this creature gives me gooseflesh in the most insufferably hot of climates. Is it a spider? Is it an ant? Who can say? Locals call it “friend of the scorpion” because, they say, it carries a scorpion underneath it, attached to its stomach. Alksjdoihfmzdbvnlkhaf!!!!

After 2 years of stubbornly refusing to become ‘the English teacher’ in the Dominican Republic, my resolve finally crumbled when my neighbor, the cutest 14 year old girl named Delicia, showed up to my house bearing a small notebook and a gorgeous shy smile, and announced that she was there to learn English. No one has ever tried this exact technique before, simply showing up ready to get started. How could I say no? Especially since all I was doing at the moment was watching my 87th episode of Friends for the day. She already knows quite a few nouns and verbs from school, but can’t speak them very well at all, so we’ve started out by expanding her vocabulary and practicing a lot of sentences out loud. It’s really no work for me – she’s happy if I sit with her for 15 minutes and send her on her way with a little homework assignment. I don’t love that she feels the need to become versed in yet another European language that sadly has taken root and displaced (to some extent) many local dialects, but I can choose to be pragmatic about this: it really could help her get a job someday. But only if she figures out how to pronounce the word ‘shirt’ in a way that doesn’t sound quite so…offensive.