Noah’s ark

When I mention animals in West Africa, I’m sure your mind goes to hippos, lions, giraffes, pythons, and other majestic things. Hold your horses. I’m going to start with animals I can find in the middle of a city of 1.2 million people. Hippos are pretty rare around here.

 Lizards are everywhere. At one point, we thought it would be fun to count them on our walk to and from school. We kept losing count. I’ve seen cute ones about two inches long scurrying up the side of our school building, to bigger ones like you see in the photo. They are all colorful in one way or another. And we like them all because they eat bugs.

 

Bugs it is. Well, technically spiders are arachnids. After one of our regular power outages I was resetting the water distiller nicely provided by the US embassy. [Side note – don’t drink the water unless it is boiled, filtered, or distilled. Cotonou gets its water from wells from a shallow water table. There is no water shortage. If there is a shortage of water, it is due to electricity shortages and the inability to pump the water where it needs to go. Waste management is almost nonexistent. Another good reason to not drink the water or swim in the ocean.] I reached back to flip a switch and saw a few furry legs sticking out from behind it. I’m not sure where it ended up, but it might have met my shoe the next day outside our living room. Then there was its cousin who we found on our screen door.  The take home message: even though they aren’t poisonous, check your shoes before you put them on. By the way, you will notice the rust on the distiller. We live less than 1/2 mile from the beach. Everything metal in Cotonou is in a state of rust. Wait until you see the airliner in a later post. I imagine this is the reason people wash their motorcycles and cars constantly

Here is a photo of a real cool praying mantis that has camped out on the K/1^st classroom window. It is tucked away too well for me to get a photo, but I got this from the teacher. It has become a nice science lesson for the kids. We are hoping it lays an egg sac. I also saw a nice little stick bug outside the same room. Everyone loves those cute little kids, don’t they?

 

Chickens aren’t wild animals, but they are pretty much everywhere. The photos are of the chickens in our neighbor’s yard. Yep, that’s their whole yard – dirt. They draw their water from that well – remember the shallow water table? Their house is made of tin and wood scraps. Sunday is clothes washing day. Sorry about the blurry photo, but the brand new chicks are cute.

We assume the bird is related to a rock dove (pigeon) because of its song. It’s the song that led us to find it hanging out on the ledge of our bathroom window. I started by pulling the corner of the curtain back and it stared me down. Last week I realized it had built a nest and laid eggs. We could actually open our window and touch her if we wanted. Bad idea. I’ll be sure to post a photo of the chicks when they hatch. I guess we will have to name her now. Any ideas?

No snakes yet. That doesn’t bother us too much. Today my run took me outside of town on a busy dirt road – I think they are all that way outside of town. When I had to run on the margin of the road I kept my eyes open for snakes. And I thought it was dangerous to run in downtown Portland.

This post is just a warm-up. We will be getting a vehicle in 2-3 weeks. When that happens, we will venture out of town. Benin actually does have all of those big animals I mentioned earlier. It has a couple of the best parks in the north of the country where those animals are found. I’m not sure if we will make it there this year, but it’s on our list. We will go from lizards to crocodiles, bugs to hippos, mantis to giraffe, and pigeon to python. We will be sure to get some photos and stories of that as well.

Thank you for sharing our journey with us.

Donn & Karin