So as the Larium pill of literacy slips down the throat of tertiary education, I realise that Wednesday night has blended into Thursday morning. The former was spent showing a film, “Bend it like Beckham”, on the Mnarani fields and despite some potentially dubious scenes, these may have included public exhibitions of affection onthe screen. More laughter was got from the mentioning that a daughter couldn’t cook chipatis and from when the father nearly caught the daughter with the football coach. This film was shown instead of a football match and it seemed to get general approval with an attendance of around 250 people, children and adults alike. When I was younger, around the seventies and the eighties, cinemas used to be in old theatres, which would have higly decorated ceilings and walls. This open air cinema had two medium sized baobabs to the far side of the football field and then an amazing star field of the equatorial hemisphere which included the much missed, by me anyway, Southern Cross.
So back to the subject of the title. On the way back from the MTG building to the Mnarani Beach Club at night, I have come across what I would describe as a large African land snail, a millipede as long as twenty five centimetres and a centimetres in width. In Zimbabwe, we called them Chongololos, I have yet to find out there names in Swahili, but imagine one of those long London buses which is heavily armoured and highly segmented with legs that move in waves instead of tyres.
One of the volunteers working on the Kenya Field of Dreams project was heard to be saving one of the gardeners of the Mnarani Beach Club from a potential crocodile attack, it did later turn out to be a Monitor Lizard. But the thought was there. On the hotel, we seem to have an inordinate number of what appear to be Ghost Lizards, but no doubt I am wrong in the naming of these species. They tend to congregate around the lights on the external walls at night so that they can grab the moths at night and flies during the day. On top of the thatched roofs, we will have a gaggle of what I think are Vervet monkeys with blue furry balls. One has lost an arm possibly from the Monitor lizard.
On returning from the project building to the hotel, I sometimes walk back through the village and you can often get stuck behind the cattle rush ten minutes. An old man and a boy will take the cattle from the overnight area to the day grazing area. This is sometimes changed with the presence of a goat rush fifteen minutes.
At the project building, there are a couple of goats that get in and start to eat the hedging plants, but hey isn’t that just life anyway.
A couple of chicken are also rounded up by rooster that is slightly reminiscent of the Roadrunner from the Looney Tunes cartoons, well apart from he doesn’t go, “Beep, Beep” nor is he blue. But sure as eggs are eggs, there will be a coyote of some type with a bundle of dynamite awaiting the aided demise of the said bird.
When you mention Kenya, people often associate the country with lions, elephants, cheetah, and other such wonderful poster animals of East Africa. But it is the little guys who are the over achievers, the dung beetles who clear up after all the herbivores and carnivores; the detritivores and the bacteria. In researching another project, the spring 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review OnPoint magazine quotes that “recent calculations published in the journal Nature conservatively estimate the value of all the Earth’s ecosystem services to be at at least $33 trillion a year. That’s close to the gross world product, and it implies a capitalised book value on the order of half a quadrillion dollars”.
