Tuesday, April 5, 2011

hungry hungry hippo

Every time I turn on my computer to write this blog I have to wait for it to go through its startup sequence—it takes several minutes, as I think this machine has picked up a few tropical viruses of its own since coming to Zambia— and the final part of the sequence and the part that always takes the longest, is the quixotic quest (yes I’ve studied a bit lately for the gre’s) for the wireless network.
Now I’m sitting here in my mud hut. It’s dark except for my last candle, quiet except for the crickets and I’m thinking to myself “good god, my computer would save a lot of time and precious battery power if it would just give up its search for the wireless internet”. The nearest router is some 40km bike ride through the African bush. Its feed comes through a rickety satellite dish, it rarely works and I’m sure they turn it off at night anyhow to save on power.
Well, there was a window into exactly what was going on in my mind as I opened up Microsoft word. Now, in more newsworthy news… There is a hippo on the loose in the village! And he has eaten some of my beans. The past few days, people have been running around trying to catch and kill a 4 ton mammal with armor skin. I was asking my nearest neighbor, mr k, whose fields I had seen were heavily damaged by the hippo, how one went about killing a hippo. No one around here is in possession of a high caliber rifle. I’ve seen the guns they go hunting with. They’re made of a lead plumbing pipe and are powered by fertilizer turned gunpowder. I thought it highly unlikely they could take down a hippo. My neighbor explained that what they do is find a place where the hippo has been coming out of the water, dig a big hole and then hope the hippo comes out of the water there again. Once in the hole, the hippo is then stabbed to death with spears.
Now at the point I’m told this I’m unsure whether this is awesome and I want to go help dig a hole, or this was awful and I should try and lead the hippo 200km back across the rivers to the national park. At the moment the course of action I’ve chosen is to do nothing—the least life threatening choice. Anyway, the hippo is still on the loose. Mr k was telling me that back in 94’ they caught and killed a hippo this way and he was put in charge of making sure every member of the village got their fair share of the hippo meat. During the dolling out process, word got round that ZAWA was on its way to look into reports of a dead hippo. Momentary chaos ensued and the meat was gone in seconds, thus mr k said he ended up with only a foot and doesn’t know how the rest of a hippo tastes. It’s too bad.
Last weekend I got K10,000,000 deposited in my account for a grant I wrote to fund a beekeeping workshop. I went to collect and spend the money in town and felt much like a winner of the toys r us prize they used to (still do?) give where you got to run around the store for like a minute and throw as many toys as you could into your cart. Only in my situation, the toys were dried fish and flour instead of lego’s and mega wheels and my toy shop a bustling open air market. Sometimes I do feel like I’ve won something just by being here.
As a result of this shopping spree I ended up with a lot of stuff including an 8ft pit saw. Getting it all back to my village, some 200km away, on a bus was a bit of a trick. My flour still hasn’t made it as it got dropped at the turnoff due to a baggage swap but everything else did. And as soon as the bus dropped me outside my village with my pile of stuff and nothing but arms to carry, the sky opens up. It was possibly the heaviest rain of the year, I mean the bus driver had me come back on the bus and wait several awkward minutes before finally realizing it wasn’t going to stop all night and telling me I could get off now. There I was, yesterday, standing at the side of the road with my pile of new things. Luckily some brave souls from the market saw me and my predicament and rushed over to help carry my things to their shelter.
Things are good this side and I hope the same is true where ever you are.