Off to Africa

SNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKE!

Despite my snake paranoia, I’m not really that girly of a girl, so when I saw a green snake with black splotches under the step up to the office, I didn’t scream or shriek or run. I stood about eight feet away watching it try to pull itself in and disappear and I said, very calmly, “There is a snake there.” All the people who were milling about during tea break started coming out of the building, streaming around the snake area, and a few men threw stones at it where it was wedged deep under the step where the rain has washed the dirt away from the concrete.

When I had passed around it and inside, and taken off my gumboots, I admit that I climbed on a chair when it started moving. People laughed at me.

It darted off across the driveway and people followed it with large pieces of brick. They smashed them down on the snake – one woman wearing only flipflops a foot from its gaping mouth – and one man in gumboots stepped on its head and then its body and ground it down until it stopped writhing.

“Um.” I said, “is that one of the dangerous ones?”

“Veh-ry dangerous.” My colleague told me. “It has very strong poison.”

“Right.” I said. “How often does it bite above the ankle?”

Because the gumboots cover the ankles, you see. I shall never leave the room – or even the bed – without them again.

…

I just passed a very long weekend without internet. We were foiled by the weather, which just wanted to prove, if we had forgotten, that this is rainy season, and a rainy season that has flooded the entire Sahel. A thunderstorm that seemed to come from all directions at once parked itself over TLT for hour upon hour on Saturday and the rain continued even harder for still more hours after the thunder and lightning subsided. Our mess hall flooded, and we had two people from another organization sleep in our compound because their house had flooded. When one of my colleagues showed up on Sunday, he said, “I’m really tired today. We slept outside because our neighbors had been flooded out of their house and we shared our house.”

I sat under my little porch during the storm watching the lightning, thinking of a Discovery Channel show I watched a few days before. There is a lab in North Carolina that records the radio waves from every strike of lightning that occurs on earth. There is more lightning during the day than at night, and more in the summer than the winter. Africa has a lot of it – the middle of the continent glows red on a lightning map of the earth. And did you know? The radio waves from lightning bounce out of the atmosphere and clear a radiation-free path around the earth. It is in this safe zone that satellites can orbit. If there was no lightning cleaning out the safe zone, satellites would be quickly destroyed by the radiation.

I counted seconds between lightning and thunder. Not because I was nervous about being zapped (I was under a roof, wearing gumboots and sitting on a plastic chair) but because I was wondering if that lab in North Carolina was recording us right then, right here in TLT, Southern Sudan.

There is nothing to do when it rains. The V-Sat internet doesn’t work (no solar power), the DSTV doesn’t work (no access to the satellite) and if, like me, you happened to be in your tukul when it started, you aren’t going anywhere. It rained hard and sideways, and I had to retreat into my room from the porch, and then further from the windows. I read, and I played some Sudoku. Then I read some more, and played some more Sudoku.

It wasn’t until the yard was a lake and the rain eased a bit that I could venture over to the mess hall to find an inch of water on the floor.

Clouds on Sunday meant no internet then, either.

I learned the rules of rugby. The rugby World Cup qualifiers are on. My favorite part is how when a team scores, it’s called a “try.” This results in the following being a frequent comment: “That was a really good try by Tonga.” It sounds hilarious when you know that they didn’t TRY, they actually accomplished, resulting in a try. And at the risk of sounding like a traitor to my country’s favorite sports, I much prefer rugby to American football. It doesn’t stop and start so irritatingly often. Also, the Samoan players, especially? Um. I might have to move there.

We watched some Africa Magic. Africa Magic is a channel that plays Nigerian movies nonstop. Many a European and North American can’t stand this channel. At least, every such person I’ve met so far on this trip has hated Africa Magic. Meanwhile, our African colleagues love it. I like it enough. The jingles are annoying and I don’t like the fake caveman-type outfits that they make the characters wear when they are supposed to be from the village, but the stories are interesting. I like the modern-city stories better than the old-time-village stories, and yesterday there was an elaborate story about a sting on the people involved in a fake building contract. Including a courtroom scene.

I am clearly watching too much TV. Weekends are so long. I could also tell you all about arguido status for the McCanns in Portugal. I anticipate Seconds from Disaster every night. (Volcano eruptions! Ferry capsizings! Space shuttle explosions! And why they happened. Each of us, as we discovered Seconds from Disaster, said, “Wait. I thought they would show us how a disaster was prevented.” But no, they show in detail why the disasters happened.) I watched a documentary on slavery in the US circa 1700. And Days that Changed History. And Pretty Woman. And Grey’s Anatomy. And a lot of news.

…

SNAKE NUMBER TWO JUST TRIED TO COME INTO ROOM WHERE WE ARE HOLDING A WORKSHOP. THIS IS NOT OKAY. “They have a nest around here.” Someone merrily told me. And they all laughed AGAIN when I knelt on a chair to get my feet off the ground. What else am I supposed to do when the snake is circling my gumboots over by the door and I’m sitting here not wearing shoes? When there is no workshop, I am often alone in this room, often until it is dark, on the internet. THIS IS NOT OKAY.

They didn’t kill this one. The problem with that is WHERE IS IT NOW?