OK, guys, you’re in for a treat because this is one of my better Africa stories.
But first, if you’re asking, Why is Holly writing so much lately? The answer is I have taken several months off my real job to work on something really exciting! More details to come….
OK.
My friend Jen and I together are TROUBLE. We have known and worked together for almost 20 years. We are a lot alike, too much alike. We both have adult acne, psychiatric conditions, no filter of any kind at all nor any shame of any kind, and a love of antics, African fabric, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (swoon). We both speak Swahili and studied together for many years.
(This parody from a beach trip we went on gives you a good idea of what we are dealing with. Warning, these are not my best vocals….very hard range…mute button is your friend):
So when Jen found an immersion course for us to take in Tanzania, I said Ndiyo (yes) and also Mungu aisaidie Tanzania (God help Tanzania). The course was offered by an outfit in Iringa, a mid-sized, central Tanzanian town set in beautiful hills, far from the capital. I didn’t ask her for many details because I trusted her (why I don’t know, given how similar we are) and also, I was raised in Africa, whatever the set up is, I can handle it. That’s generally my posture towards most anything. I laugh at danger. In theory. This time it laughed back at me.
After a long big plane ride, a short small plane ride, and an hour car ride, we arrived at the retreat center where we would stay and study. It was a beautiful, but rustic place along a river. The first sign of trouble was that my banda‘s door would not lock, so they had to put me in a reject banda, which, as it turned out, was infested with termites. Also there was a massive spider that permanently lived between the two window screens. But I cleaned up the visible termite tunnels and made friends with the spider, it was fine.
My bigger problem was that I was dying from Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). OK, not technically. Background: everyone has their weird phobias, and mine is that I have a blood clot that is about to kill me. I feel like this is a pretty rational fear as phobias go—I have blood, it clots, we’re all gonna die. So when I got off the (long-haul) flight in Dar with a pain in my calf, I naturally assumed I had DVT and not a pulled muscle from the long run I went on hours before my flight. I wasn’t irrational and terrified enough to cancel my trip to rural Tanzania though, so I just continued on, took aspirin every day, worried about it constantly for two weeks, and went to the ER immediately upon return to the US. NBD.
Then Jen was attacked by a spitting cobra. That part is true. It missed her, thankfully, and the camp people killed it. When she texted me to tell me what happened, I thought she was being dramatic. Also I was focused on organizing our ride to town so we could buy reams and reams of African fabric. I am more organized than Jen (that is quite a statement) so I handle our logistics when we travel.
I also love that Jen did not know who Nancy was, another classic. Nancy, by the way, who will go on to become the hero of this whole story, was a badass single mom who knew everyone, could do anything, and with whom I personally would never mess. I also love that I’m texting in Swahili after she told me a snake attacked her. Always the overachiever.
So we survived the cobra, bought a sh*t-ton of fabric, and had planned to go to a near-ish game park for the weekend when we turned in on a Friday night. And that’s when things got really interesting, and by interesting, I mean cataclysmic.
I’ll let Jen take it from here for a bit via a FB post she told me I could share:
My theory is that it was a bat that dive bombed her. Anyway, stay tuned for the next installment. It only gets better/worse from here.