So the bugs in Panama deserve a post.

Many expats get bitten & I don’t mean small bites, I mean lots of bites. Not all expats do, it depends on your body’s chemistry. The more sugar you have in your body, the more it will attract the bugs, but there may be other reasons they bite.

I get bitten all the time & a lot of the bites turn into red welts that are very painful. Sometimes they get infected & it can take upto 1-2 weeks for the swelling to go down. You would think I had the chicken pox or something. One time they swelled up my foot so it was hard for me to walk.

The Gruber’s oil that so many people here in Panama use doesn’t work all the time on me. That’s both the repellant as well as the concentrated oil to stop the itching & pain. Sometimes it works, but when the bites are really bad, it doesn’t.

I also ordered an all natural insect anti itching roll on from France that I used to use & it ALWAYS worked back in Canada, but here it’s a hit or miss, most of the time a miss & it was just too expensive plus the small roll ons don’t last long because the bites are so painful so I’m applying all the time.

An expat mentioned that the Panamanians are used to the bites & they don’t get infected since they have been bitten as children & have built up an immunity. While expats who are new to the country suffer a lot more. Even after a year it’s still bad for me.

Sometimes the bites take me out of commission for a day or two as I’m assuming the venom from the bites weaken my body.

90% of the time I can’t see the insects to kill them & that frustrates me. They always come out at night time.

Closing your doors after dark is helpful, but not absolute. The problem with doing that, is if you don’t have air conditioning, now your house is back to having no air flow & you are hot.

Another thing the bugs do is fly at warp speed into my face. If I didn’t have glasses, I’d have lost an eye already by now. It’s happened to me several times now in different rooms in the house. One expat told me it went into her eye & she was in a lot of pain obviously.

I have microscopic ants all over my desk that I can’t get rid of. They crawl all over my monitor, keyboard, & even in the kitchen on my Niken water purifier & up & maybe inside my kettle. JUST NUTS!

Just thought you should know about the insects in Panama.

Michelle