Erika and I are alive and well today, so no worries :) But it was a terrible week...
First off, both of us got the stomach flu (or some unfortunate illness) -- Erika at the beginning of the week, and me at the end of the week. It's not fun being sick here... but we were fine. I got tested for malaria twice (finger pricks... not painful at all, thankfully) but both tests came back negative so they think it must have been the flu. So now we're kinda playing catch-up with our lessons, but we're not too far behind. Everyone here is pretty flexible because illness is just a regular part of life here... you have to work around it. Our student Kipsy had malaria this week, too, and Jimmy, another visitor, has been sick for a couple weeks. That's life.
The worst part of the week, though, was Wednesday afternoon. I was complaining in my last post about the monster spider. Well, we killed another one of those Wednesday morning... so I thought, man, Erika's sick, there's another nasty spider, that's enough bad stuff for one day. Ha!
That afternoon Erika was digging around for a receipt. I was up in my bunk reading reading for class or something... she pulled down a black Adidas duffel bag, which had been stacked at the top of all our luggage, at the end of our bunk beds, right next to our pillows. She's rummaging around in it for at least three or four minutes, pulling stuff out, digging in the corners, when she gasps and says "I think there's a snake in the bag." I'm up on the bunk so I just tell her to run and get the guard. She finds Papa Lokwii ("Lo-kwee"), an elderly man who works as our gardener. I could hear her talking to him, trying to remember the word for snake (he doesn't speak English). "Umm... ee-.... emun?" She told me when she said "emun" his eyes bugged out and he jumped.
At this point she wasn't sure it was a snake, she just knew she had seen something moving in the bag. Could have been a lizard, a scorpion, anything. But she grabs a broom and Papa Lokwii brings his walking stick, and he manages to hook the handle of the bag and bring it outside. As soon as he lifted the bag, I could tell it was way too heavy... there was something in there. He brought it out to the concrete block in front of the schoolhouse. I waited to make sure it was actually in the bag before I got out of my bunk (in case it had snuck out and was under the bed) but soon I saw Papa Lokwee and the dog jump, and got out of bed as fast as I could to watch the beating. He beat the snake to death. It was a five foot forest cobra... and we were later informed that one bite can kill an elephant in three hours. He smashed its head in and the blood is still on the concrete.
So, talk about God's providence. Erika had her hand inside a bag with a deadly cobra for several minutes and wasn't bitten. Let me tell you, she was shaken up. It was a close call. But she wasn't meant to die on Wednesday. God was protecting her and He shut the cobra's mouth.
We are now being extra careful (paranoid??) about ALWAYS keeping our doors shut and locked. It must have crept into the banda when we had the door ajar at some point... probably trying to escape the rain. It has been raining several times a day here (dry season? yeah, not so much).
So, basically, we survived. And Psalm 91 is our theme, I'd say. We survived the plague and the cobra. Another lesson in trusting God... we can't make it on our own here. Talk about a reality check!
We're fine now... it's a sunny day, we've got time to get our work done, and tonight we have a community meal so we can just relax. We're both feeling much better today.
Special thanks to Aidan Kharroubi, who has been praying specifically that God would protect us from snakes :)
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