Various Homes 9: two short stays
We moved from the mountainous Vipya area into Mzuzu town, first to a friend’s house while he was on a month’s leave, and later to a cottage. Both stays were short but memorable.
The battle against insects, whether they fly, crawl or jump, is endless in Africa. In Malawi, malaria was a constant threat. We took prophylactics and endured their side effects, slept under nets, and sprayed regularly but still treated any fever as possible malaria. We dipped or powdered pets to deter ticks and fleas, and scrubbed kitchen cupboards searching for those hard cases, or oothecae, of cockroach eggs.
Cockroaches, who have had over 300 million years to perfect their way of living, had a firm hold on our friend’s house. Going into the kitchen at night, seeing the surfaces covered with the creatures and watching them twitch their antennae before scuttling into hiding, was an unsettling spectacle. For me, once was enough. If I got up at night needing a glass of water, I went to the kitchen door, flicked on the light switch, and walked into the sitting room. After a few breaths, while gazing through the window into the night, I went into the kitchen. Not a cockroach in sight. It was easy to pretend they had never been there.
The move to the cottage was during the early part of the rainy season when heavy downpours are common. Arriving back at the house during one of these storms, I dashed from my car with a raincoat over my head and went in through the only door. I was inside no more than a few minutes before preparing to make the return sprint to the car. As I opened the door and lifted my foot, I looked down. There, stretched out on the small porch, sheltering from the rain, was a Gaboon viper – the most beautiful of the viper family but the most deadly. I could only stop and gaze in awe as it lay motionless, displaying its geometric patterns and shimmering purple-brown colouring.
Whether I had stepped over the snake on my way into the house, I do not know. They are sleepy creatures and slow to strike, so perhaps I had, but I wasn’t going to risk it a second time. Quickly closing the door, I retreated into the house to wait for the rain to stop and the snake to leave its refuge.
Photographs from the internet
extratime05 
One evening, I was sitting by a camp fire under a silk cotton tree in Southern Sudan in 1980 when a boomslang fell out of the tree and got tangled up in the plastic faux wickerwork of a chair next to me. My colleague attacked the snake and chair with a panga. Scared the life out of me, but now I know that boomslangs have fangs in the rear of their mouths, so it was not particularly dangerous for me if it had been left alone.
Too many snakes are killed, when if left alone they will leave human company
Really enjoying this short-form version! (Even if the subject matter, in this case, is triggering enough that I now have to do a parameter check around my desk 😆)