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.