Mom mom (and anyone else who has a fear of snakes) my want to skip down a paragraph or two! So this past week I was talking with one of my students after school. He had to stay late and cultivate/clear a field with a small backhoe as a punishment for being late to class that morning...holy buckets! If Eric and I had that punishment for being late to school we would have cleared a route to Lincoln and back! Yeah, this kid shrugged it off like, "huh that's what I get" type of thing; I was stunned. Anywho, while he was clearing a patch of grass, I saw him stop, take a step back and to the side, then forcefully swing his shovel towards the ground and do so continuously for about a minute. I asked him what was going on when he stopped, and he told me very calmy, "oh there was a serpent." Upon closer inspection, I saw a wrigling little foot-long snake about a foot away from him.
I proceded to ask him if it was dangerous, but before he could answer one of the other students jumped over, looked at it and said something to my student (Pelinliwa - his name). The look on his face afterwards said more than he could explain. The next words out of his mouth, translated for your convenience, were "I could have died." He then explained that the snake had enough venom to kill him before the sun set, which was roughly an hour away. Oh boy! Needless to say I was jumping around the already cleared sites at the slightest movement from a blade of grass! Pelinliwa picked up the snake with a stick and tossed it into the woods, and went back to clearing the field in a much more amusing, yet understandably so, cautious fashion.
After he finished, we walked to his house and then went to the market for some food!
Post Script. I now carry my snakebite kit everywher, even into Kara.
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