Tangerine harvesting

October 27, 2008
For the last couple of days I’ve been craving tangerines. It seems like every time we go to the village we come back having eaten at least one tangerine. But I wanted some to share with everybody and myself. On Monday some of the kids showed me a tangerine tree, and we went to pick about 30 of them so that we could share with all the students. Much of the fruit was too high to reach by hand and so we used a stick to try and knock some off. But in this wonderful fruit tree are these flies called marbontus. They are about the size of a bee, brown and look dangerous. They are fast and they can barely touch you and you will get stung. One of the boys, Devenish, got stung but I didn’t so I was still trying to get some tangerines. Then I got stung and ran away like Devenish did.

Today I didn’t want to let the flies defeat me. So I convinced Maria to go collect tangerines with me. Because we have bee hives here on campus we also have bee keeper suits. So we got the bee suits and headed up to collect tangerines! We felt very silly wearing bee keepers garb to collect fruit from a tree.

It took quite a while to collect enough tangerines to feed all the students. At first the marbontus did not bother us. But after we gave the tree some really good shakes they were all over the place. One got in my hat and stung my head. And Maria got two stings on her arms because her gloves were not long enough.

I didn’t take my camera because I didn’t want to get honey or tangerine juice all over it. But maybe we’ll do it again and get a picture in our bee keeper’s suit.