How I learned to love the Grub (-Andrew)

Imagine, if you will, that it is a dark, Halloween night and you are way outside your comfort zone. You're standing on a wide-planked wooden floor that sags ominously when you step, under a high palm thatched roof but with no walls, in a shelter on the banks of a slow dark river that feeds into the Amazon. There are ducks, random dogs, and goodness only knows how many chickens moving around your feet, occasionally brushing your chigger-bitten legs or letting out a sudden unearthly wail. You're helping photograph and videotape a horde of young children who just converged on the only place you're even slightly comfortably being in in the entire village and are now wielding a small flaming gourd, while you pray that they don't burn the whole place down. Suddenly, the woman who has been your host for the last 3 days and will be for the next 3, who has been cooking dinners for you, letting you sleep on her porch, and letting you keep your stupid mosquito nets hanging for 24 hours a day in her already fairly limited space turns to you. She holds out her hand to offer you a small dark something about the size of a golfball that you can't actually see in the flickering gourd light. You can't tell what is in her hand, but when she also gives you a piece of yuca to go along with it, presumably to make it go down easier, and yuca isn't that good by itself, you know that at the very least, it will be interesting. Especially when you look down and see that the gourd passing has stopped, and a dozen children, several adults, and your loving girlfriend are all looking at you expectantly, with little smiles on their faces that are not at all comforting. Keep in mind that only one of these people actually speaks a language that you understand, and that one doesn't look like she's about to offer any helpful advice. You imagine a variety of gruesome tastes and textures, all the horror stories you've ever heard and the lessons your parents taught you about accepting things from strangers, compounded by the fact that you're in one of the last great wildernesses on the face of the planet, which has more than enough diseases/parasites/viruses to subdue a multitude of explorers, all of whom were a hundred times tougher than your puny little gringo self.

So what do you do?

You MAN UP. (or WOMAN UP if you are one)

You take that little golfball along with the slice of yuca, smile confidently at the crowd, and raise whatever it is up to your mouth. Even when it gets two inches away, and you finally can see in the Jack-O-Lantern gourd light that it is a fat, bulging insect, with a little black face and slimy white sides (although thankfully not moving. yet.), you do not let the smile fade. You put it between your teeth (strategically placing the yuca between your tongue and the bug) and hope that first "Pop" doesn't trigger your gag reflex and cause you to regurgitate whatever's left of that afternoon's tuna-fish, rice and beans almuerzo.

You do it for America. You do it for the English language. You do it because, even though you actually like their version more, where you come from football is a sport where people hit each other and don't fall down for no reason. You do it because you will probably have to come back to this village and face these people in the daylight, and even if you don't, some other pale-face will, and they shouldn't be judged because of you. You do it because biologists are the toughest people on earth. You do it because you only get one chance to do something like this and because trick-or-treating, making small talk at parties, and stumbling down Franklin Street will always be there when you get home.

So you chew, and chew, and chew, and after a longer amount of time than you would like, you swallow. And it actually doesn't taste that bad.