Just burn it

The fire approaching our house

“Don’t worry,” is what I believe the guard was telling me in Swahili, “we won’t let it get past here.” I walked out of my house this morning to find a part of our yard on fire, and land in front of our house singed from a fire earlier this morning. “Why are they burning the bushes?,” I asked my roommate. “My gut tells me that whatever reason they give you, they are really doing it because of the snakes. I heard them talking about them this morning.”

Taking initiative is good, I wanted to tell the guards, but destroying habitat is bad. Fewer snakes near houses in a part of the world where there are about 197 known species, of which 47 are believed to be toxic to humans, sounds objectively like a good idea. But not all snakes are bad, and in fact many species, including some of the poisonous ones (and a good conservationist would say all of them) are quite good for a variety of ecosystems, including backyards. I know one couple who say they breathe easy when they have a cobra in their yard because cobras are territorial and help to keep the really scary snakes – like puff adders and black mambas – at bay.

But how can I justify letting our guards burn the land around our house – habitat for an endemic species – when at the very same time I am at the office working to help turn a charred landscape back into habitat for a different species? Who’s to say that the species I am trying to help is any better than the snakes around my house?

These are questions I pondered this morning as my yard continued to go up in smoke. The problem, which I am now complicity contributing to, is that burning seems to be the solution to too many challenges here. It is used to dispose of garbage – a fact I bemoan when walking through clouds of burning plastic on my way home from work at night. It is also used to eliminate tall grasses around people’s homes, to help keep bandits from sneaking-up on them; to generate new grass for cattle to graze, as the grasses here tend to store enough energy to regenerate once every dry season if burned; and to clear land for cultivation. Whether someone is getting rid of something or making room for something else, it seems that too often the mantra here is: just burn it.

I was once enjoying a sunset with friends when a blaze began on an adjacent hill and spread quickly. As we wondered how far it would reach and how fast, I asked “why do people here build fires that seem designed to spread out of control? Why isn’t just burning their land enough?” The female in the group rolled her eyes and said, “They’re trying to look macho.” And if the camping trips I have taken with my friends in DC are illustrative of the male mentality here, we are lucky there aren’t garbage bags full of propane and twenty-something Tunisians in Kigoma.

Another friend added that clearing land by burning is technically illegal now, so when people burn their field they also tend to burn their neighbor’s for good measure. That way if the police come to investigate, they can say “don’t look at me – Achmed started it. Just look at his land!”

This concerns me because so much of the landscape we are trying to conserve is land that was once fertile forests and is now barren and scarred from fires. To clear land for cultivation, people usually set fires to remove brush, grass and snakes. But too often those fires are not controlled, and in the dry season they can spread and destroy ecosystems tens of kilometers away from the region that will be cultivated. I have seen huge hillsides lining the lake that show no signs of cultivation, but which are totally destroyed from the fires that regularly sweep through the area.

And because the top soils are thin on the hillsides, agriculture can usually only be sustained for a handful of years before the top soil washes into the rivers and settles at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika. And when that happens, the families must move their crops to an adjacent slope, where first they have to clear the land, and the cycle continues.

Luckily the fire at our house is a small one, and is being monitored and beaten with a mango branch whenever it wanders beyond the “snake zone” (and if that is not the case, you can imagine what I will be writing about on Monday). But I have to wonder, if every household were to burn their shrubs, and communities continued to burn so much of their crop land, where would all the snakes live? Suddenly the couch at the Kigoma airport doesn't seem like such an unsuitable habitat after all.

The charred ground below our mango tree

One small step for man...

...one giant leap for blogkind.

This weekend I hiked a transect through a remote region of Tanzania with scientists who were assessing the soils and streams in a local watershed. I wanted to share with you some of the lessons I learned during our hike through this beautiful and unique part of the world:

People who wear a size 10 ½ shoe should not depart on a multi-day hike with only one pair of size 10 shoes (these ones have killer tread - perfect for the landscape here - but the largest size I could find in town was a ten).

The hotter it gets, the less nature tolerates straight lines.

Sometimes the heaviest things rise to the top (this photo was taken over a mile above sea level).

Magical forests really do exist. We found this one above the rocky outcropping in the previous photo.

I can make sand by rubbing my thumb and fingers together over a piece of sandstone or quartzite. (I liked to think that I contributed to the future shores of the Tanganyika Ocean... the Lake today is spreading much like the Atlantic Ocean did when it began rifting millions of years ago).

Sometimes the most beautiful things in nature are the ones that don’t quite fit-in.

Restoring the landscape in the area where I am working is ultimately possible, since many of the soils are still in tact.

The hotter the hike, the better the sunset. This one was worth every step it took us to reach the lake.

Be careful what you wish for

This weekend was simply snake-filled.

On Saturday evening I was swimming in Lake Tanganyika at sunset when I felt something brush-up against my foot. I looked through the water and found a beautiful, olive green Lake Tanganyika Water Snake; quite common here, and totally harmless.

Later I swam to shore and sat on the beach as the sun sank behind the hills of Congo. As it did so, what appeared to be a little black head kept resurfacing between the shore and where I had been swimming. It was impossible for me to identify what I saw, but I couldn't help but wonder if maybe... just maybe... it wasn't a water cobra.

Then on Sunday, before leaving Gombe, I was walking down a gravel path when something slithered several feet in front of me. My eyes fixed on the object, and I was surprised and delighted to see a 2.5-3 foot snake lounging on the path before me. It was a beautiful pastel green - oddly sporting camouflage better suited for an Easter basket than a forest - which made it look deceivingly charming and innocent. Now I know how Eve felt.

So I have been respectfully greeted by snakes and I have respectfully greeted them in return. Now that the introductions have been made, I expect us to have a cordial (or at least non-lethal) relationship in the years ahead. Hopefully they will stick around long enough for me to get a photo next time.

Outside in

The road to Lugufu

About a two-hour's drive south of Kigoma there is a camp called Lugufu. It is populated by Congolese citizens and the landless children they have born there - approximately 61,000 people in total - some of whom have lived in the area for fifteen years or more. The camp is funded by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, and is more commonly referred to as a "refugee camp."

I visited there last week to escort two visitors and to learn more about my organization's programs serving the refugees. It was an experience I will never forget.

Let me begin by saying that it is currently the dry season in Tanzania. Dry meaning no rain. Dry meaning I had lived here for five weeks and hadn't seen a drop; barely even a cloud in the sky.

As I stepped out of the Land Rover and approached the mud-brick and wood-beam schoolhouse, I heard a dull clap from the clouds above. I grabbed my jacket, and stepped into the classroom.

Approximately one-hundred students had gathered to welcome us, singing songs about the environment and acting-out a play about the perils of bushmeat hunting. As they clapped, so did the thunder outside. As our cameras flashed, so did the lightening. More clouds rolled-in and I noticed that they were the same steel-gray shade as the corrugated tin roof above us.

The rain began to pour, and the louder the classroom grew, the louder the students sang, until it seemed that the students were riling-up nature, and vice versa. Hot, sweaty air in the classroom was replaced with fresh air that smelled of campfire smoke, and the sound became deafening with the children and the earth seeming to scream with joy that rain had come at last.

Somehow the storm and the singing ebbed and subdued in unison. We all walked outside together, getting our shoes muddy, laughing, and feeling a little more alive.

The fluctuations in weather here can either save or take lives. On this day, the contrast between the dusty afternoon and the post-rain paradise was matched only by the contrast felt in each of us.

After the rain

Same great birthdays, half the filling

There has been a lot of talk around Kigoma about birthdays lately, mostly because I have been initiating it. My roommate had a birthday on Sunday, and when I told one of his friends about it, that friend sent him cryptic messages in Kiswahili congratulating him on what sounded like the birth of a new child. "Birth day," I take it, is a concept most often used in conjunction with a new birth. Not often does someone recognize or celebrate a birth that took place years ago. How silly!

I was also surprised when one of my good friends here recently told me that his birthday was "June." "June... what?," I asked. "Just June," he replied.

Based on my conversation with that friend, it does not sound like there is a reliable birth certificate system in this region of Tanzania, perhaps because babies are so often born in dispensaries or at home, and as a result many people do not know exactly what date they were born. Perhaps the father remembers one day, and the mother another. It gets confusing after a while.

You will find that some people refer to their birthdays as a day of the week. For example, they were born on "Tuesday." And sometimes you can infer the day of the week that they were born without even asking, because they are named after it - such as people named "Jumanne" or "Mwanne," the male and female versions of the word "Tuesday". (For whatever reason, it seems like a totally disproportionate number of people here who are born on Tuesdays are named for that day of the week... an ethnography Ph.D. waiting to happen if ever there was one.)

When I talked to my roommate about the so-many-children-so-few-birthdays phenomenon, he added that job applications frequently have the date of birth section filled-out as "January 1st" or "June 1st," depending on the month the person was born.

So today is my birthday. It's hard for me to forget the date because it's one of my mother's favorite topics between mid and late August ("I will never forget the moment when..."). And as much as I feel like I should be craving an American-style birthday - with a cake, sombrero and a chorus of overly indulgent waiters - I am actually quite happy at the prospect of having a more Tanzanian birthday tonight: dinner at Gibb's with a glass of wine, and either one or two close friends or just my notepad for writing.

And if I'm really lucky, Martina Navratilova will be there in time to split a dessert with me (or at least to use her tennis racket to keep the mosquitoes away).

Tree of life

The fig tree at the end of our driveway was alive with activity this morning. You could hear it buzzing from a dozen meters away, seeming to pulsate with life. Along the tree's profile you could see bees flying in and out of the branches like fish around a coral reef: curious about what was beyond the tree's protective branches, and suddenly gripped with fear and turning to high-tale it back.

Birds swooped all around, catching the bees who wandered too far. It seemed the ripe fruits on our tree were providing a feast for all sorts of creatures this morning. Hopefully the bees will leave a couple of figs for me.

Danger, danger everywhere

I was walking home from the restaurant Gibb's last night when my flashlight paused on an unusual trail in the dirt before me. Having never had the trail of a snake identified for me before, I had no trouble identifying this one.

I followed the trail with the beam of my flashlight and, seeing that it extended beyond my beam of light, I followed on foot. By the looks of it, the snake was a solid medium-sized snake for Tanzania (what would be considered a HUGE one back home). The ridges of its trail measured from the tip of my index finger to mid-way between my first and second knuckle. Based on my limited knowledge of snakes and their respective sizes, I wondered whether what I was seeing was the trail of a boa constrictor, or a puff adder, or maybe just a harmless house snake.

At that stage, my curiosity was greater than my fear. I followed the path around and around in circles down the road and found that one end of the trail led to a concrete ditch. No snake there. I then followed it around and around in circles in the other direction, until it led me to a pile of brush.

The beam of my light quivered back and forth through through the leaves. I investigated with suspicion, knowing how well the snakes here can camouflage themselves. At any moment, I expected an object that I had misidentified as a pile of leaves to uncoil in front of me.

At this stage, my fear began to reach a level that was approximately proportional to, and then greater than, my curiosity, and I backed away from the leaves and followed the dark, secluded road away from the brush, the snake and my brief moment of bravery.

So now, I still haven’t seen a live snake here, but now have proof that they exist – and in proportions greater than I have ever seen before.

On a side note, my roommate woke-up the night before last to the sound of what his sleepy-but-experienced-in-biological-matters mind identified as the see-sawing vocalizations of a leopard. He later told me that the guards in our neighborhood saw what they identified as a leopard on our front lawn some time ago. Let’s just say that if I see those tracks in the dirt on my way home at night, I won’t be following them into the bushes to see where they lead.

Green hills of Gombe

The hills of Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

I had the good fortune to go to Gombe Monday through Wednesday of this week, where I climbed the hills in the above photo in search of chimpanzees. We did not many chimpanzees - only six in total - but the ones we did find were unforgettable, and well worth the scrapes, sweat, bug bites, nearly-twisted-ankles and bumps and bruises experienced in search of them. Suffice it to say, unless chimps are taking the trails through the park, the people in search of them generally have to leave the trails, too (but at least we get a guide).

Below are photos from some of my favorite memories during this excursion. I hope you enjoy.

A primate in a tree, one of many we saw this morning

A baboon takes a break in a palm tree

A baboon forages

Tabora emerges from the forest

Tabora puts on a show

Tabora with her mother, Tanga

Tabora eats a leaf

Tabora swings about

Tanga eats in peace while Tabora plays nearby

Tom looks on bitterly as his little sister gets all of the attention

Tabora hitches a lift on her mother's back

Sparrow looks like she forgot something

Sparrow looks around, still seeming a bit confused

Two trees

Ant on a leaf

The beach where we swam at sunset after a long day of hiking

Tight security

I made the mistake of lamenting recently that I hadn't seen any live snakes yet on this trip. And since that time, it seems that everyone but me is seeing them here.

It started a couple of days ago, when some biologist friends of mine found a baby cobra eating a lizard outside their office. "It was so cute," they told me, as if they were talking about a kitten.

Then last night my roommate told me and the biologists about his trip to the Kigoma airport last week: "They hauled the big red couch out of the waiting lounge and tossed it into the dirt drive, yelling Nyoka! Nyoka! [Snake! Snake!]." He says they used sticks and poles to pull back the couch cushions, tearing the red velvet paneling to shreds.

A large black head rose from the center of the couch. "It was a spitting cobra," my roommate explained casually, which the airport staff and proactive passengers wasted no time in sending on a one-way ticket to the waiting lounge in the sky.

I couldn't help but think about the headlines this would have made in America: "Deadly snake unseats passengers." And while such events hardly seem commonplace here, it still took my roommate a week to tell me the story, which must say something about the story's normalcy, at least in his mind.

The biologists gave me some tips: use a flashlight whenever walking home after dark; and look for bobbing heads on the surface of the lake whenever I swim. They said they don't know of anyone who has ever been bitten by a water cobra in Kigoma, but there are "lots of them" out there, and it's best that I be alert and not surprise one. [Note to Mom: the biologists said the snakes probably think a person looks a lot more like a crocodile than a fish, so they will want to stay out of my way as much as I want to stay out of theirs. Also, since I want to avoid the crocodiles as much as the snakes do, I probably won’t be spending a whole lot of time in the water anyway.]

This brings me to an important paradox in my transition to Tanzanian life. These stories can be alarming, but one of the reasons that I moved here was to see and experience the rich biodiversity in the region, and wherever there are more of the breathtaking and beautiful plants and animals there are also more of the creatures that want to eat them (or at least do the ecological equivalent of stealing their wallets).

I should note that I know people who spend plenty of time in the water here, or who walk the streets at night, and who have never had any problems at all. And as far as I can tell, the best reason to have a flashlight at night is to avoid twisting my ankle in a pothole. As one friend joked, it looks like the fault line between the Indian and African tectonic plates runs along Kibirizi Road.

I believe that one of the keys to remember is that when I am in nature, I am in their home, and I need to respect their home, their space and do what I can to avoid overstepping their territory.

So I borrowed a book last night from a former colleague, and it is packed to the gills with information about the snakes of East Africa: what they look like, where they live, which ones are deadly, and which ones are the size of a pencil. Too often people jump to the conclusion that all snakes are deadly here, when naturally that is not the case. (To drive this point home, my roommate has a specimen in a Konyagi bottle on his desk which he collected recently after some kids killed it, thinking it was a water cobra when instead it was a beautiful, harmless water snake.)

To help ensure my safety, I will be reading the snake book in detail – or at least the parts about deadly snakes. And I am also taking steps to ensure that I am safe in my home (since snakes so rarely read books about how to respect my habitat), such as closing the door behind me when running out to turn the water spigot on or off, or closing the screen door out back when I am doing laundry outside. I am also considering burning my couch on a quarterly basis. And I’ll probably wait outside the airport next time.

So no, I still haven't seen any live snakes on this trip. But maybe that means that I am doing something right. And as long as I continue to make noise when I walk and carry a flashlight at night, hopefully I won't be seeing too many of them in the future, either - at least not at close range. And while that might mean that I have less to blog or talk about, that is just fine with me.

Flora and fauna

I wanted to share with you the images of some of the plants (and one insect) I photographed around my house this past weekend.

Plumeria, or more commonly called Frangipani

This tree drops the most fragrant and beautiful pinwheel flowers. My roommate and I use them to clean the dipstick when checking the oil level in JGI's Land Rover in the morning.

Pink Plumeria

Plumeria tree behind our house, with the clothesline I use to dry my socks in the foreground

Hibiscus bush flowering along our driveway

A mango tree in front of the house where I am living; I am told that many of the blossoms will become ripe mangoes for me to eat

The back corner of my house, with a stand of trees

A plant near our front patio; it reminds me of the crotons sold back home

Pink flower blooming along our driveway, with our front patio in the background

Unusual insect who had an unusually good time trying to evade me and my camera

Bad lizard

One of the culprits trying to make a great escape out my window.
Does he look guilty or is it just me?

Little lizards like this one seem to inhabit every crack and cranny of my house - inside and out. Normally I welcome them, saying "eat the bugs, just don't poop on my clean trousers." And so far our cohabitation has been rather amicable, even entertaining at times - like the moment one of them jumped out of the toilet and startled me. "You got me this time," I said laughing, trying to act nonchalant.

But this morning one of the little critters crossed the line. There was lizard excrement in five different places on my clean khakis, with little prints of it trailing across only the most noticeable places. "I thought we had a deal?," I pleaded to the rafters.

So I spent part of the morning trying to wash my trousers, and then finally gave-up and dug-out my dirty (or now suddenly "clean," relatively speaking) slacks, which I am now hiding behind my desk as I type.

In the end, they outnumber me, so it's in my best interests to learn to play by their rules (except for the jumping out of the toilet bit). But I learned an important lesson this morning: I may pay the rent, but the lizards are in charge around here. And in case there were any questions about that, I guess they decided to drive the point home. I got the message loud and clear.