Creative writing course - Week 9 - A memory of ants

I missed week 6 of Creative Writing. During week 7 and 8 we didn't do any writing exercise. Instead, we watched and discussed a couple of TED talks. One by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled The danger of a single story and the other one by Elif Shafak titled The politics of fiction. I strongly encourage you to watch them whether you're interesting in writing or not.

On week 9 we talked about memory and we were told to write a little something describing or inspired by a memory. I wrote about the day I was bitten by the bullet ant. It's mostly a bunch of scattered ideas, with so little time it's hard to compose something coherent and unified. I had already written a entry on this blog about that experience back in April 2012:

https://tanaicardona.blogspot.com/2012/03/conga.html 

Ants

Back in the day, when climate change wasn’t a thing, there used to be many different species of ants in my hometown. Two different species lived at home. One of the them were black and tiny, no more than a few millimetres in length, and they were completely harmless. The other ones were called, candelillas, little flames. They were a dark shade of orange and had a painful burning bite. It was forbidden to eat in bed, because just a single crystal of sugar could attract the candelillas and they could attack you in the middle of the night. These ants were part of home and you could always find a long procession carrying crumbs of bread or bits of dead insects anywhere in the house during the quite hours of the afternoon. In the park, near the Sinú river, I remember seeing often two other species of ants. The leaf cutter-ants, which are like beefed up candellias, and a solitary type of slightly larger black ants that liked climbing on trees.

Nothing could have prepared me for the day that I met the bullet ant for the first time: the Godzilla of all ants. I remember it to be larger than my big toe, but I was about 10 years old. I was in the middle of the tropical rainforest with my dad, squatting on a rock and bathing in the fresh morning sun breaking through the dense canopy. When I saw the ant, or better when I felt the ant, it was already too late. It had grabbed my foot with its powerful claws and its stinger was deep inside my flesh.

I don’t remember the pain, but there is a reason why they are called the bullet ants. I remember being on my dad’s shoulders, I was unable to walk and developed a strong fever. I remember pineapple plants along the path to the tribe of the Emberá people. I remember the shaman asking me to drink some kind of medicinal potion. And then, my memories ended abruptly.