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I arrived home the other day, hot and sweaty, to see a cockroach leg scuttling across the kitchen floor. No cockroach....just its leg. It was being carried by twenty or thirty ants and destined for an ant hole the size of the ants, but NOT the size of a large cockroach leg. 

Now you might say I have too much time on my hands, but I crouched down to see what the ants would do about it. They approached the hole with great confidence and attempted to push the leg down. That failing, just like a Charlie Chaplin sketch, they retreated, turned an angle, and tried ...and tried again. How they coordinated themselves is bewildering. We humans are supposed to be the ones with the sophisticated communication system! I just needed to remember my mother and I moving a TV set!! (Albeit with a great deal of humour).

I don't hold a great deal of sympathy for ants, but I was somewhat drawn into their struggle. So I broke the cockroach leg in three and crouched, watching to see if they would fare better. But as they remained challenged and I really did need a shower, I left them to it. 

It was in the shower that I discovered the remainder of the cockroach, minus a few legs and very much alive. I have even less sympathy for cockroaches, but frankly, being dismembered by well organized ants does seem a particularly vicious way to go. Anyway, I didn't want to share my shower with the truncated creature so I scooped it up in a shovel and flicked it outside where it's lopsided scuttle immediately caught the attention of a lizard and in two bounds and a gulp, the cockroach was gone.

Following my shower I checked the progress of the ants and their prize leg. All was still. No ants, no leg, just a lot of happy chomping somewhere in the depths of the brickwork of our house. It kind of gives you perspective on your own mad struggle for life, doesn't it?

[Originally from New Zealand, Wendy Tripp is a member of the Servants Cambodia team and lives in Phnom Penh with her husband Steve and kids, Isaac and Niamh.]