Cobras, Lizards, and Crabs....Oh My!

Many who know me know that I am not an outdoorsy type of gal. I’m not a big fan of bugs or critters and I would be a happy camper if I never had to see a spider again. (Side note: I probably wouldn’t be afraid of spiders if I had not been subjected to the horrors of the movie Arachnophobia as a small child. Thanks, dad. I can still to this day only watch that movie in daylight.) A fact I’m thankful to know is that there are not poisonous spiders in Malawi….just really huge ones. I think I can get over that. The animals that are poisonous though are the snakes. Great. Awesome. Wonderful. Are you catching my sarcasm here? (Brenda Gisewite may want to stop reading at this point. Skip directly to the next paragraph.) One night as Sami and I were headed back to our rooms for bed, we met our night watchman, Nathan, on the bridge. He told us in a very matter of fact tone that he had just killed a cobra by our chalet and that he had put it in the ditch under the bridge. He was so calm that I didn’t even understand what he said. I think I had to scrape my jaw off the ground once I finally comprehended that a 60 year old man killed a massive cobra with a stick. A STICK. This is not a drill, this is not a ride at King’s Island in the 90’s, this is a real f@%#ing cobra that is usually only seen in zoos or Indiana Jones movies in America. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very soundly that night. 

Let’s move on, shall we? The lizards are actually pretty awesome. They’re the same little guys you might see on a vacation to the Caribbean and I remember them from when I was in Honduras. These critters are on my side of the matter when it comes to spiders except I think they take it a little far. They EAT the spiders. Praise baby J! It’s almost as if they are my army in a war against the arachnids. ALL the lizards are welcome in my house and one of my favorite things to do is sit under the Mango tree and try to count how many are on the branches. 

Crabs. Did you know that there are crabs in Lake Malawi? Because I didn’t. I was in the kitchen cooking and had asked Sami to go to the boys’ laundry bin for an egg when I heard her shout from the other room. (let me explain why there are eggs in the laundry bin: The bin itself is a large wicker basket with a lid. The hen likes to go in there and lay her eggs. I don’t know why. It just does.) When she went over to the bin, she only saw the legs sticking out from behind and had thought it was a rather large spider, hence the shouting. When I came out to see what the ruckus was all about, I saw Fumbane (foom-bon-e) holding up the mop with a crab dangling from the end. It was something that both of us never expected to see but it was definitely a highlight from the past two weeks.