It started innocently enough… with dog food.  Cheap dog food.  REALLY cheap dog food.

I (James) got a “great” deal on dog food on a bulk shopping trip in the closest big city (Lae).  We learned how “great” the deal was when we opened the dog food later only to find it had a bunch of bugs in it.  So, we naturally put it where all bug infested dog food should go… in our basement!

Turns out that was a HORRIBLE idea (duh!).  But, it was better than the pantry.  ;-)

A few weeks went by and the bugs must have mutated or something because they were now different bugs, and there had to be millions, no trillions, actually GAZILLIONS of them, in our basement (which also happened to be our storage room).  We affectionately described them as “dust with legs” because that’s about how big they were, and they looked like THICK dust… that moved.  Wanna see some pictures?  Click here (FYI: they’re kinda yucky).

We tried all sorts of things to get rid of these bugs: 10 bug bombs, fumigation, prayer, and freezing the entire contents of our storage room in a humongous walk-in freezer.  All this took place in the six weeks before we left for the U.S. to have Timothy.

And we thought that was the end of it…

(drum roll please)

Obviously, one of the first things we did when we got home was check for bugs.  In all of our searching, we only found about two in the first few weeks we were here (they were quickly squished).  AMAZING after what we’d seen during the infestation.

Then, tonight, as Christina was about to put some pepper on her food, that creepy feeling returned… the bugs were back.  I don’t think either one of us will ever look at dust with the same light-hearted flippancy of those feather dusters you see in movies such as “The Feather-Duster Goes to Town” and “Return of the Feather-Duster”.

All joking aside, when Christina noticed the dust on the pepper shaker, she looked again before brushing it off and saw that it was MOVING.  Our stomachs did a triple lutz followed by a dive down through the floor before returning like a lump of coal on Christmas morning and residing firmly in our throats.  This couldn’t be happening again.  [Insert agonizing prayer here… seriously].

After some thorough investigation, it seems as though the bugs were isolated on our spice rack.  So we cleaned it, put the spices in the freezer, and will keep our eyes peeled for more dust walking around our kitchen.

Please pray with us that we will not experience a repeat of what happened just before we left (the description starts here and you can read more of the story here: start at the bottom).  Our hope is that this was just an isolated incident and we are again trusting in God’s faithfulness to carry us through this.