The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

56 SEPTEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL cockroaches that my stomach still churns at the memory), we moved into a brand-new house on the edge of the bush. There we had a garden. Or what would become a garden when the doka (deep-rooted scrub bush) was finally dug out. With that yard came maciji—snakes. The name of one species, translated from Hausa, was the “there is no tomorrow” snake. We drummed into the kids that when they saw any snake, they must turn and run, shrieking “Maciji!” We instructed the staff, particularly the gardener, to kill every snake they found and show it to me. I lost count of how many. One Sunday morning in the dry season we invited another American family with children to lunch after church. Peter, the houseboy, appeared around the corner telling us they had a snake for us to see. He certainly did. A python at least 12 feet long, and maybe 18 inches in diameter was stretched out, head- less, behind the servants’ quarters. A few weeks into the dry season, northern Nigerians burn the bush to force a second growth of grass to feed cattle. The smoke stuns various critters, making it a good time to hunt. The night before, we had seen fires across the river and into the distance. Peter and a friend had found the python’s hole. Peter had stuck his leg down the hole, let the smoke-drugged python coil around his leg several times and pulled it out. They had whacked off its head with a machete and carried it back to the compound. “What will you do with it?” we asked. “Good to eat,” Peter responded. Peter and his friend carefully removed the skin, scraped it and staked it out on the ground to dry. They then hacked the body into cross sections about eight inches long and smoked them slowly over a smoldering fire behind the quarters. We bought the skin, which went to innumerable “show and tells” in our kids’ classes back in the States before we finally trashed it. We also bought two pieces of the smoked meat and ate one, tastefully prepared by the cook (I never asked how). The meat tasted like and had about the same texture as smoked pork chop. The other piece remained in the freezer so that when inspec- tors came fromWashington, I could serve it to them for dinner: “We live on the local economy. Do enjoy the python.” Alas, we were reassigned before that opportunity came along. Last seen, that piece was still in the freezer. Stinging Visitors Scorpions look like miniature lobsters except that their tails, which end in a nasty stinger, usually curl up over their backs ready to strike. The stings can be extremely painful, and are dan- gerous for small children. I first encountered them as a teenager in Rangoon. Without warning, one or more would appear on our living room’s red- concrete floor, tail up and waving. Once one even materialized in the middle of the floor between two lines of dancers doing the Virginia reel! In fact, scorpions appeared so frequently that we developed a foolproof disposal system. Take a newspaper and plop it on top of the intruder; then drop one or two copies of Fortune magazine (best because they were big, thick and heavy) on top of the paper. Jump up and down on the magazines to smash the invader to bits. After removing the magazines for next time, carefully wrap the squished scorpion in the paper and trash it. Repeat as needed. (We got so blasé that even my 6-year-old brother dis- patched scorpions with great aplomb.) When my own family moved to northern Nigeria, we faced the same threat. The good news was that African scorpions tended to stay out in the yard. But the bad news was that they were bigger than the Burmese variety, and more dangerous. When our gardener got stung while clearing a flowerbed, his badly swollen hand and arm were an object lesson for the kids. They quickly developed a healthy skittishness about turning over rocks, and learned how to do it without putting their fingers underneath. We did have one or two scorpions turn up in the house. But our experience paled in comparison with that of some Peace Corps Volunteers who were teachers in a much smaller town fur- ther north. They were playing bridge one evening in the walled courtyard of their house. A scorpion climbed over the wall and down toward the ground. The person who was “dummy” whacked it. Soon another came over the wall. And another. Over the course of the evening perhaps 50 appeared. Whoever was dummy was the designated scorpion whacker for that hand. An Unwelcome Souvenir When our two-year tour in Kaduna ended, I supervised the packout myself (there were no moving companies then). A local team loaded most of our worldly goods into a lift van that would travel by sea and eventually catch up with us. I packed a separate air freight shipment that would be delivered once we were in our new house in Virginia. Weeks later, as I was unpacking that box, I discovered a scor- pion flopped on top of the stack of dinner plates. I don’t even touch dead scorpions, so I reached for the interloper with a pair of tongs. Up popped the tail. Away it skittered across the plate