Longtime Lowell writer, scholar and teacher moved to Cambodia in January 2022 and has resided and worked there since. This is the first in a series of occasional essays called Letters from Cambodia in which George will provide a glimpse of everyday life in Cambodia and will also take on some of the bigger issues of the day.

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Letters from Cambodia: Fire Ants

By George Chigas

Even the smallest, no bigger than a dragon fruit seed, can hurt like hell and leave a welt that itches for days. Tiger balm helps a lot. But the worst are the big red fire ants, angkrong pleurng អង្ក្រងភ្លើង in Khmer (Solenopsis geminata). They’re viscous and merciless and fast as hell. Before you know it, they’re up your pant leg and digging their razor sharp pincer into your arms or back. They lift their butt when biting as if to get more leverage and hold on like a bronco rider as you jump around frantically pulling off your shirt or down your pants to rid them.

They make their nests in trees, especially mango trees, rolling a leaf into a tube, sometimes several nests in one tree, and march back and forth in a long, unbroken line down the branches and trunk or across a fence or wall touching one of the branches, and if you disturb them, even if by accident, or even unknowingly walk under the nest, they’ll parachute down & attack en masse, and like I said they’re fast as hell, so even if you try to bolt, they still manage to get into your sandals or grab onto a pant leg.

If the nest is low enough to reach with pruning shears you can cut off the branch, but usually the nests are out of reach, mango trees can be big, so you have to get someone to climb up. It’s a suicide mission really. Then you have to drown the nest in a large bucket of water. There’s no easy way to do it, when the loped branch with the nest falls to the ground, legions of irate dragoons swarm out in every direction hell bent on exacting revenge. As fast as you can you have to snatch up the branch and dunk it in the bucket of water, but no matter how fast, there’s already fifty or a hundred ants crawling up every limb of your body and up you back and even into your ears.

Even though most of the ants that were inside the nest are dead and floating in the bucket of water, there’s hundreds maybe thousands more still swarming around confused and angry making it unsafe to go near. After an hour or so, after you’ve changed out of your clothes and showered and applied tiger balm to the bites, you can come back & try using a long bamboo pole to lift the bucket (still swarming with the little devils) and carry it outside the fence into the rice field and dump it there. But Cambodians like to put the ants in their soups and stir fry, so best to wait and after a day or so  drain the water through a sieve and give the protein rich, tasty exoskeletons to a neighbor. They’ll be forever grateful.

Geo/ Γεώ/ ជីអូរ