All Wrapped Up for You

Last Week was quite the adventure!

Aside from our usual adventures in India of constant power outages and Internet interruptions.   This week was unique in that I learned I could face some of my greatest fears and survive.

It started out as a perfectly normal day.  I have a very small washing machine.  It does four towels at a time or a couple a pairs of pants etc.  Which is good that it is small because I don’t have dyer so everything is hung out on the line.  I don’t like to have the laundry hang on the line over night so every morning I do two or three loads of laundry and hang it on the line then every evening take it down and fold it.  On this particular day, it was four o’clock in the afternoon and I was standing on my baloney hanging a dress on the line, when I heard a noise above me (noise is a constant in India, I don’t think it has ever been quiet here since we arrived) and as I glanced up, a dark cloud was descending around me. In the space of a few seconds my thoughts were the following:

• ·      What in the world is going on?
• ·      Something is landing on me?
• ·      Oh no it’s bugs
• ·      Oh no it’s bees!

At which time I took off running into my apartment, literally flinging my clothes off as I ran.  Three bees were kind enough to hitch hike a ride in my hair but all in all the other couple of thousand were left outside on the patio.  After I calmed down enough to find my cell phone, I called my husband and told him, “Get home now!”  To be honest I didn’t calm down until the next day.

Fortunately I wasn’t stung.  I have known since coming to India that the Lord was protecting me but never more so than that day.

view of the bees on the 6th floor

view of the swarm from my balconey

When my husband arrived home he told me some masons had been working on the sixth floor and had stumbled upon a bee swarm building a new hive.  (Actually what they had done was open a window were the bees were attached to the ledge and caused them to fall on me).  The bad news is what I thought was maybe a hundred bees was more like a couple of thousand.  For dinner that night we had comfort food!  My husband was kind enough to fix me some rice pudding and we watched one of our favorite tv shows.

view of some of the dead bees from my kitchen door

The really sad thing for me is, as much as I don’t want to have bees near me (or particularly on me) they are all dead.  Instead of moving the swarm (OK I admit it is something I have only seen on the Discovery channel on TV.) They poisoned them.