The Stockers' Stories

And the three mystery creatures from yesterday’s post are:
Scorpions. A boot is good for dealing with scorpions. We’ve squished probably close to a dozen of them in our house over the past month.

We’ve encountered many scorpions in our home. Thus far only Dean has been stung.

Bats. A tennis racket is good for bats. We’ve also smashed close to a dozen bats, but hopefully that will be over soon. We just had our house fumigated for bats. The exterminator tells us that the smell of the poison should go away within a week, and then the smell of the dead bats will last for another couple of weeks, and after that we should be fine.

When we first came to Malawi, Jolie would shriek in terror if the electricity went out. Now she’s unfazed when bats swoop around her bedroom. She’s come a long way!

Snakes. No snakes in the house–don’t worry, mom! But we’ve seen four outside, three of them non-poisonous. The poisonous one we killed, with the assistance of Sitha, a Malawian who lives on the farm. He bashed it a few times with the end of a mop, and Penny finished him off with the machete. There was some disagreement about what kind of snake this is (or was). Sitha says that it is mbuvu, which according to our Chichewa dictionary is a “small, white, very poisonous snake.” But this one doesn’t look white to me. When another Malawian was over later in the day, we showed him our mbuvu, and he said, “No, that’s not mbuvu. It’s a mamba.” Either way, we’re happier with it dead. Apologies to our herpetologist friends!

Sorry, this isn’t a very pretty picture of a mamba. But we’d rather kill them first and then take their picture.

Some other creatures, like spiders and lizards, also inhabit our house, but we’re happy to have them around, because they eat the world’s deadliest animal, which has also been known to frequent our home: the anopheles mosquito, which carries malaria.

Spiders are our friends.