Little excitement

In the picture you can see what is the remnants
of Mozambique Spitting Cobra. It happened to
wander into the compound and it created a bit
of excitement.
It actually isn't a lethal snake but when it's provoked
it rears up, spreads it's hood, then ejects
venom into the eyes of an adversary. It can also
grow to 1.5 meter or about 5 ft.
I was in my room when I heard some commotion.
The cry was ... there's a snake under a log. The
log is actually a tree trunk cut in half which will
be used sometime in the future, but I don't know
for what.
Everybody in the village has at least a few sticks
about 2 meters or 6 ft long somewhere near their
houses. These sticks are used to deal with the
local snakes. The most prominent ones are the
Black Mamba, Puff Adder and of course the above
mentioned Mozambique Spitting Cobra. The first
two can be lethal.
So, we go out and after a few minutes of how are we
going to get the snake out from under the log ... I must
mention that at the time we weren't sure if it was
the spitting cobra or a mamba. the colors can be
somewhat close when looking under a log ...
What happened was, as someone rolled the log
over as to expose the snake, it appears that it
actually rolled over it's head and ... goodnight
spitting cobra.
Nothing fantastic other than the excitement of it
all, probably easier to understand when one's
face to face.

That wasn't the only exciting part of the week.
After almost 9 months we've finally have the
the Khwedam (one of the San languages)
HIV/AIDS DVD almost ready. Well, we
finally have all the clips. I put it together last
night and I am pretty impressed with the job
that the local health workers did in making it.
It is in the editing stage but it doesn't look
like it needs much work. Just trimming the
beginning and end of some of the clips. It
is usually a fairly easy process except that in
this case, I don't know the language so it
will take a little longer to get it worked out.
Hopefully not another 9 months.
But, the value of this DVD is that it will be the
first one of it's kind for the Khwedam speakers.
It is pretty good, it explains what is HIV/AIDS.
How to contract it, how to protect oneself
including demonstrations of the male and female
condoms.
It explains testing and also the counseling process
and it's confidentiality. It explains a little about
ARV's and adherence. Plus it explains about
misconceptions.
One cultural point is that one of the practices
the Khwe people have/had, is that of
using a razor blade to make a cut, then
putting in some traditional medicines. The
major point here is of sharing or usage of the
blade.
But again, it came out ok, so I guess the wait was
worth it.
Other than that, it was a slow week but school
begins again next week and the Romanian people
that are here are having 23 visitors. They are
coming for about 2 weeks to help them refurbish
their building.
Man, that's going to make 28 white people here.
That's more than I've seen in almost a year.
And they're all Romanians so I can actually sit
and converse with them.
So, it looks like things are going to pick up.