Snake!

“Snakes make people run into trees...Snake! POW!” –Richard Prior

So, I had my first encounter with a snake at my house. On a cool Suriname night that was again perfect hammock lying weather, I heard something fall near the front window. I thought it was another nail since a few were loose but when I opened up the window and looked down there was a little snake about a foot long, curled up by my shoes. So the only question was what to do with the snake. Naturally, I grabbed my machete. Although I decided to play it safe and ask some of the local teenagers for help and to see what kind of snake it was. According to the teens, it was a poisonous snake. In this case, my choice of machete was ‘hogi poi’—very bad choice. So the teens took a big piece of wood from a nearby construction pile and swung it at the snake. They wounded the snake with the first hit and it struggled to slither away. That’s when I took a bigger piece of wood and finished off the snake. Kaba, the end for the sindeki—snake.

I figured after this snake I had reached some kind of yearly quota for animals at my house in the first two months here at site, but as fate would have it another snake came to my house less than a week later. It squeezed under my door and began slithering through the house while I was writing a letter to send back home to St. John’s School, my World Wise School, and totally unaware that anything had entered the house. For those of you who are not aware I have nightly visits from bats who crap in my house, frequent visits from rats, I have had an abnormally enormous termite nest in my house, ants, one lizard that took me by surprise and chased me out of my house and now snakes. The villagers will probably start a pool to guess what animal will come into my house next.

And all these snake encounters have reminded me that I needed to clarify one very important event from high school cross country: there was a snake on the fire trail, Schieffer!