The old toad who lived in a shoe

Some mornings are more like nursery rhymes than others.

When I was in forth grade, my class watched a film about scorpions in which the climax included two shots pieced together: one of a scorpion climbing into a slipper, the second of a woman putting a foot into said slipper and screaming. I haven’t worn slippers since.

In fact, directly after that film I developed a habit of checking my shoes for danger – spiders, etc – before sticking my feet in. That habit continues to this day, and now my seventeen years of shoe-checking are justified.

I leave my dress shoes in my office and walk to and from work in my comfy shoes. A few colleagues were outside my office when I arrived this morning, and we exchanged pleasantries while I surreptitiously changed shoes behind my desk. I checked my right shoe, all clear, made the switch; I then stuck my hand in my left shoe and… wait a second, there’s something in there.

Something BIG.

Something with eyes.

I screamed; a small crowd gathered.

To explain my predicament I stepped outside (with one shoe on) and shook my left shoe. Nothing happened; the crowd stared. “Just wait,” I explained and gave it another shake. Still nothing; people watched cautiously and curiously. I then carefully pulled the insole out of the shoe, the creature staring at me with a racing heart, and gave the shoe another gentle shake. Back legs dangled, the crowd went wild.

I felt bad giving Mr. Toad a wild ride, but then again, as I recall it’s in their nature.

It took some coaxing before I finally got the toad out of my shoe. “You’ve confused your children’s stories,” I told him, “it’s an old woman who lives in a shoe. You hastily drive stolen motorcars and get in accidents. What would Mole and Badger think if they saw you here?”

The toad was convinced and went on his merry way, while I kept the office dog at bay.

For those of you who are wondering, I did not kiss the toad and it did not turn into a conservation practitioner (apparently only frogs do that). Nor did I dress him in a Harris Tweed suit and give him a cigar, as tempted as I was.

My colleagues believe this is a good omen for conservation in the region. “He knew you are doing conservation work,” a colleague said, “you must welcome biodiversity even in your shoes.”

Then I was given a moniker I did not expect: “Rob Mfuga Vyura” (Rob the keeper of frogs). Let the record show I let the toad go.

Please pass the yams, I mean avocado

Easter is a time when family and friends come together to eat delicious food, drink good wine and after a few hours, pull the Tupperware out of the fridge and do it all over again. It's like Thanksgiving minus the football.

When these things are not possible, I suggest making the below simple dishes and eating them while watching a DVD with a holiday or birthday theme (for example, "Steele Magnolias" begins and ends with an egg hunt).

Easter Pie

• Take box of Jiffy Pie Crust, add water, roll into two crusts (vegetarians should cross out “lard” on the ingredients list).
• For the filling:
  o Take one package (20 oz) of dehydrated cherries shipped to you from Lee
  o Hydrate them in honey, flaked almonds, juice from 1.5 limes, about ¾ cup water and a little sugar.
• Place bigger pie crust in bottom of 9” pie pan (or metric equivalent), add filling and then the top pie crust. Cut a lion’s face through the crust for ventilation and effect.
• Pop into oven until smoke rises.
  
  
  Easter Guacamole
  
  
• Take two avocados, one tomato, one small green pepper, two small onions and a wee bit of jalapeño-style pepper
• Cut and mush together
• Add salt
• Stick in fridge
  
  

  Now, for the entrée:
  

  Easter Quesadilla
  
  
• Defrost two tortillas brought to you by a friend from a major city
• Thinly slice Archer White Cheddar cheese (after aging it nicely in your fridge)
• Layer the cheese between the tortillas and heat until cheese-oil forms a shallow puddle
• Tip quesadilla sideways and drain oil
• Cut quesadilla into six wedges (for this, you will need a knife that is sharper than your quesadilla)
• Top with chilled pineapple
  

Eat the above dishes in the sequence of your choice and with the DVD of your choice, but don’t forget to call your mother.

I forgot to mention the ants in the closet

I had a phone call last night with my future hopeful roommate. The conversation was later described by a friend as "the weirdest flatmate interview ever." Here are a few bullet points from that conversation:

• The water heater is broken again, and the guy who knows how to fix it has a kidney stone and is in South Africa getting treatment. I can get it fixed when he returns.
  
• Only two burners work on the stove, but I can get that fixed, too. I've been reluctant to call the man who I know is able to fix it; he ran off with some of my money last year.
• The oven has seen better days, but it's hygienic.
  
• The house technically has two bathrooms, but functionally it's really 1.5. You'll understand what I mean when you see your bathroom.
  
• Bugs have largely been eradicated, and not without risk to my personal health and sanity. There are no rats, but we do have lots of geckos, which are harmless unless they get too close to your toothbrush (salmonella).
  
• There is no TV, but we have a bookshelf made out of an old fishing boat (on loan from a friend). We are also next to the road, which is its own source of drama.
  
• We don't have pets, but there is a monitor lizard in our attic (his name is Monte). We also have giant ants which clean their whiskers and are otherwise reminiscent of cats.
• None of the clocks in the house work, but punctuality isn't exactly an issue here.

At the time, I thought I was making the house sound quite favorable compared to many homes in town. But as my friend later pointed out, my potential roommate is still in the states, and issues of this nature are not often discussed during these calls. Let's just hope I didn't scare her away...

It all started with a casserole

My friend Olga recently hosted a dinner at her home, which was partly a goodbye dinner before several Spanish friends move on. She emailed the following message to her friends, and I thought it was a beautiful summary of a wonderful evening. She agreed to let me share it with you:

... and everything started with a casserole of beans with chorizo and morcilla. A half kilo was left, after the fiasco during first episode. Muzungu show, Gernika's beans.

Last Sunday we had a tribute to the little time left for us in Tanzania. I put on the stove, slowly. Hours hours and hours. Beans, dark ones. Alubias from Gernika. Chorizo. Morcilla. Jabugo…

While waiting, a beer. And we do flan. Thanx Royal.

Delicious food with the best of Kigoma. Yummy. Everything. Food. Company. Wine. All alcohols. ALL.

Afternoon passed. Slow and smoothly. Without noise. Wine after wine. Jokes and Laughs. Like any Sunday. Wherever.

… and there we finished. Mixing Madonna and Radiohead, rum wine and beer… in front of Tanganyika Lake… I am going to miss it… I am going to miss them.

Against the current

Paddling to the lagoon

During the “best honeymoon ever,” which is what Joanna and I jokingly called our trip together in January, we stayed at a tree-branch level open-air bungalow on the east coast of Zanzibar. While there, we somehow became good friends with the guests in the bungalow next to us, the sum of whose ages was still younger than us (they were 6, 7 and 7). Joanna and I tend to have unconventional “honeymoons,” but on this particular portion of the trip we whiled away the hours playing board games, admiring oddities found on the beach, and I spent a lot of time pretending to be asleep in a hammock. Maybe that's not such an unusual honeymoon after all.

I guess it should have come as no surprise that when Joanna and I announced we were going on an adventure, our three new friends announced that they were coming with us.

So the owner of the bungalows rented bicycles to us (luckily “us” included our new friends’ parents) and pointed us in the direction of the beach where we would meet fishermen who could take us to a place called “the lagoon;” an area where I was excited to try out my new snorkel and mask.

There were many things I wanted to see and share with Joanna, many of which I had sketched into the margins of my journal: giant fluted clams, Moorish Idol fish, needle spine urchins, and the unmistakable anemone whose Latin name is appropriately “magnifica.” So once we reached the lagoon, Joanna and I swam off to explore the coral, leaving our friends to splash around with their parents.

Or so we thought.

We were admiring several fish when everything seemed to scurry away. “Matt,” we heard a child yell, “MATT!” One of our friends had followed us, and apparently he had forgotten my name.

So two became three, and we snorkeled together, admiring the coral when there were no fish to see. Joanna realized she forgot to apply sunscreen and she returned to the boat, thereby leaving me to honeymoon with my seven year-old friend, who tended to yell "Matt!" whenever there was something interesting to see, thereby scarring whatever it was away.

We were floating in an alcove of coral, admiring its varying shapes, when the coral suddenly began to drift away beneath us, and quite rapidly. In no time we were in a channel of muddy water, which appeared to be flushing us out to sea.

“Grab onto my arm,” I told my young friend, but he wanted to swim himself, like adults do. “I’ve got flippers,” I explained, “so I can swim faster than you, and we need to go as fast as we can.” The more we talked, the further out we ended-up. Finally, he grabbed on and I began swimming.

I thought I was doing pretty well. I got us out of the strongest part of the channel, and we were in shallow enough water to see that we were making progress, although it was slow going – and of course there was no telling if the current would get stronger or suddenly change direction. “Rob,” he yelled, “there’s a boat coming for us!”

I lifted my head out of water, and he was right, there was definitely a boat headed in our direction.

As I understand it, this is the approximate exchange which had happened back on the boats:

Joanna: “Does it look like they are getting further away?”
Parents: “Nah, I’m sure they are fine.”
Joanna: “No, that is too far; Rob wouldn’t swim that far away, we need to get them now.”

The boat raced toward us on the current we piled in, grateful to be challenging the current in a wooden boat, even if doing so was extraordinarily more difficult than swimming.

It took us a long time to paddle back to shore: we paddled against the current on its edge furthest from Zanzibar, then crossed and got kicked back nearly to our starting point, but at least now on the Zanzibar side. We were dehydrated and hungry by the time we reached the shore where we disembarked, but we were grateful to all be together, and on solid ground again.

The pier near where we returned to dry land
(photo copyright Joanna T)