Wild Life

I’ve been waiting to write about this until I had a satisfactory collection of pictures to truly depict the horrific—uh, I mean incredibly diverse wildlife here in Mozambique. Alas, most harrowing encounters take you by complete surprise at moments when you are sans camera (mostly at night in the latrine) so you’ll have to use your imagination a bit. Let me start off here by saying that the people in Texas have no idea what they’re talking about. Granted, I’ve never been to Texas and everything may as well be bigger there than the rest of the states but I’m just saying unless they have ants as big as thumbs and beetles as big as fists Africa has all rights to the claim that everything’s bigger here.

A prime example is Tyrannosaurus Rooster, (or T.R.) our surprisingly cowardly friend who wakes us up each morning with his oversized rooster voice box. The first day we arrived we saw him strutting across the yard and stood in awe and shock until I came to my senses and snapped a picture of the beast. Since then we have tried numerous times to get another shot of him with something to scale but he’s so skittish we have yet to succeed. He even lets the normal-sized roosters chase him around. You’ll just have to take my word for the fact that his head comes up to my thigh.

A really big millipede

Sometimes, when I’m napping in my hammock or when the rains bring excellent porch-sitting weather I forget where I am because life seems so normal and calm. But Africa is always quick to remind me that I’m here in her untamed midst—whether it be bats in the roof, bugs in the flour, a dead mouse in my closet or the straight-out-of-Revelation plagues that swarm the road at night. My favorite was of what can only be described as tarantula-cockroach-cricket hybrids.

It’s not all bad, though. In fact, some of it makes me never want to leave. Where else can you get fresh pineapple for less than 25 cents? Or huge mangoes, papaya, oranges, coconuts and bananas fresh off the trees in your yard? In the afternoons we all sit and chat under the shade of a cashew tree that’s bigger than my house and at night we sit under more stars than you could imagine. If you only look up for 2 minutes you’ll see 5 or 6 shooting stars on a clear night.

One of the aforementioned plagues

It’s a constant battle between “how did I get myself into this mess?” and “how did I ever get so lucky?” but at the end of each day as I’m brushing my teeth under the Milky Way, clear as day from my back porch, the latter wins out and I go to bed happy.

…unless of course there’s a scorpion in my sheets.