Rats, Bats and Cats

Entry Via Letter

I’ve decided today that I have officially crossed the line from an American to a Tanzanian in a sense that I am now able to fight the wildlife with a passion that would make the people of Fema incredibly distressed. I originally purchased Pepsi the cat because I felt he would scare the mice away. After the first two weeks of yowling and hissing at everything that moved, I felt the rats would have packed their bags and moved on. This was an incorrect assumption, as I found one morning when I arose sleepy eyed and hair tussled to wash my face in the bucket and found a small rat, swimming frantically to keep his head above the water. The logical thing to do would have been to put more water in the bucket to drown the obviously exhausted creature, but what I actually did was run out of my house (now fully awake) in boxers (in a country where women barely show their ankles!) yelling at everyone I saw to come see the huge beast I had trapped in the bucket. After a small crowd of men armed to the teeth arrived at the back door, they came upon the bucket, then between slapping each other on the backs and falling over laughing they managed to pull the bucket outside where Mama Kihiki dumped the bucket of water and greeted the swimming creature with a large rock, which finally killed it. Mama Kihiki proved to be the hero – probably because at this point all of the males were laughing so hard they were convulsing, she even had the sense to bring me a kanga to cover my incredibly white legs which – caused more of a ruckus than the rat. Since this story wouldn’t die around my village, I decided I would have to work drastically to make up for my “rep”, and I found the opportunity two days later while building my garden with my students. The building of the garden led to HUGE arguments, as they all insisted I would never be able to finish if I kept digging so deep, alas we continued, mostly because I bought chai for everyone, until Mama Kihiki suddenly jumped from her seat shouting “nyoka, nyoka” (snake), immediately impassioned, I rushed from the garden with the large hoe I had been furiously swinging at the dirt and decided I would be the one to kill the snake, this lust for reptile blood was not only fueled by my need to up my “street cred” but was also fanned with remembrance of the cobra that snuck into my chicken coop and stole my eggs (the first two my kuku has laid). After swinging the hoe at (but not killing) the snake the first three times I shouted for my students to bring me a machete so that I could cut off the head of the snake – one managed to pick himself off the ground (where he like all the others was quivering with laughter) and brought me my weapon of choice; which I used to finish off the snake. As I held the snake to take its picture (where like the snake, my head was cut off) I realized now that I was a toughened Tanzanian woman, ready to kill all the scorpions, lizards, and snakes (as well as rats) that dare to enter my domain.