If I wanted a reason to stay inside and lock the doors...

One afternoon after I’d finished laundry and was fetching something from my trunk, I see a long, shiny black snake slither past the screen door to my back yard. I yelp! and run outside (outside to the front, obviously, not outside to my backyard with the snake) screaming “A snake! A snake!” Hawa runs away from my house and jumps onto the bantaba. Neene stays where she is on the collapsing bantaba next to my house. Rugi tells me to sit in the hammock. I tell her if I sit down I will not be able to run.

A man walking past our compound is called over and told about the snake. He grabs a large stick, takes off his shoes, and goes into my house. He doesn’t see anything and ask where the snake was. I cautiously follow, wave my hand in the general direction of my backyard, and run back outside to the front. Then Mamadou takes off his Teletubby shoes to follow the man with the stick, carrying a stick of his own. Still no sign of the snake.

Suddenly I hear a lot of banging and clanging and smacking. Fatou Bobo has come over and is hitting the outside of my corrugate fence. Neene, still sitting calmly on the broken bantaba, tells me a snake was also in the compound this morning while I was at the school. More boys join the crowd and the whacking of my fence with sticks continues.

Then one of the boys points out the swarm of bees in the mango tree overlooking my yard. I thought I’d heard swarming bees while doing my laundry, but it sounded so exactly like a swarm of bees that I thought it couldn’t actually be bees, because surely they only sound like that in the movies. The boy instructs me to be careful because “they will kill.”

Eventually everyone leaves my house and the snake is pronounced gone. Neene tells me that when Amadou returns home I should send him to the market for something that will stop the snakes from entering. I hear the word “dirt,” and she makes a spitting-into-her-hands motion, and a spreading-around-my-fence motion, so I assume she is referring to cement, which you mix with water and dirt and if spread around my fence would block the gaps and stop snakes from entering.

Then Fatou asks if I’ve washed yet. I say no. She says go wash, the snake is gone. I say okay…. She says if I see a snake, call for her. I finish washing without complications, but just as I’m re-tying my head-wrap, Hawa calls for me to come outside. A group of people are whacking the ground near Amadou’s house –another snake has been spotted and a konkoran is running across the field, waving his arms.