It has been pitch black for most of my nights in Rwanda, but last night was different. Yesterday’s rain must have cleared the dust from the air and the full moon was beaming through the cloudless sky and illuminated the path home.

Like most paths in the bush, there are always bits of vegetation on the path. For obvious reasons, I try not to step on anything that could be conceivably be equipped with fangs and venom. At the same time, there are a lot of such snake-like items on the path, so when it’s inevitable that I’ll place my feet close to some number of them.

I’ve only heard of three instances of snake encounters in Rwinkwavu. There was a poisonous snake killed in the hospital a few months back, one of the PIHers on her first night ran into a snake in her bedroom and finally, one of the Rwandan staff stepped on a snake (with no side effects) some time ago.

I was about halfway to the Major’s house my brain fired off a message.

“Yaw? You just walked by a gigantic snake. You probably want to turn on your flashlight now. It’s not a big deal or anything, but given that your foot was a few inches from stepping on it, I thought you might want to know in case you wanted to prevent death. Like I said, no biggie…”

The message didn’t register as terribly urgent so I took a few more steps, flicked on my flashlight, before it sunk in. Right. Snake.

I swung the flashlight around and lying on the side of the path was a seven foot long black snake (methinks it was the deadly black mamba). It was curled up lazily at the side of the path and once the light reached its head, I saw it reared up and pointed some very beady eyes in my direction.

I felt my body starting giving up control of my bladder and bowels, but my brain was still working fine. It fired off another message.

“Dude. No one is going to believe this story. Get closer and take a picture.”

I actually started to take my off backpack before the lessons I had learned during my middle school science fair project on snakes came to me. This was likely a venomous snake on the prowl for one of the many mice I’d seen on the path. Given the length of the creature, it was apparently successful at killing its prey and a camera’s flash would either scare it into fleeing (likely) or striking (unlikely).

Given my luck thus far, I decided not to press my good fortune. Instead of reaching for the camera, I kept the light on the snake and it swung its head towards the bush, uncurling as it slithered into the darkness.

As I turned around and headed home, I knew the organs I’d saved from possible death would not let me forget this chance to risk my life (see previous post) for a photo, especially given my mocking of Adrienne.

I did not have to wait long for another brain message came across the wire.

“Wuss.”