emilyispegeln -

It's a trap! - Madema and spider webs

It really does make me happy that we’ve finally started to work on the project for real, and left most of the permit stuff behind us. I know those parts are important too, but preparations and paperwork has never really been my thing.

The other day we spent shopping for necessary things, such as buckets, ropes and weights and got caught in another torrent of rain. The narrow streets literally turned into rivers and what would’ve been a not too long walk, turned into a three hour trip! Every now and then, the rain would just come cascading down from the sky and we would all run in to the nearest shop and pretend to admire their beautiful clothes. Everyone else was doing the exact same thing though. Excellent opportunity to learn some Swahili. “Leo mvua” which means “Today it’s raining”. (The typical Swede, always talking about weather). I enjoyed wading through the knee-deep water, even though I didn’t really wanted to think about what was in the water and instead tried to be thankful that I didn’t have any open wounds on my legs this time (which I had in PNG).
Unfortunately and understandably, I didn’t bring my camera to the markets, so there are no pictures of school children running through the water and men slowly making their way to the mosque through the rivers that just kept coming.

But as I said, we’ve started working on our project, which included the building of 10 madema traps. (In case you’re wondering what they look like, they’re the ones on the pictures). The trap maker arrived a few hours after sunset and we started working outside (he did most of the job though) by putting together the disassembled traps. It was hot (“It’s Africa, of course it’s hot” – was our assistants comment to this observation), sticky and I have a nice blister as a souvenir from the plastic bands that we used to tie all the wooden parts together. Also learned that a machete is a “panga” and a smaller knife is called “kiso”. It worked out pretty decent; we now have the traps and can start using them as soon as the tide is high enough (in less than a week).

Oh, and check another trap maker out. While we were building the madema, Elisa (my supervisor) noticed that the trees above out heads were covered in spider webs and spiders the size of… well I don’t really know what to compare them to. Smaller than my hand, but bigger than I would like them to be! Just as I was wondering what would happen if one of them fell down, we spotted one hanging on to our traps. I managed to take a picture of it before our human trap maker threw it out on the street.
“They can be dangerous, these spiders. This one? Oh… I don’t know.”
It’s gonna be fun living on Spider Lane for another seven weeks.

2014-11-07 @ 07:17:52 Allmänt Permalink

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