Snakes!

So we knew there might be snakes at Ciyanjano. But we weren't sure how many or what kind. But last week I saw Jalios Sakala throwing rocks at the side of the team house and I thought, "Uh, oh, Sakala must be going mad!" I ran out and shouted, "What's the problem over there?" He shouted back, "BIG SNAKE!" The preferred method of snake killing is stoning. You get to keep your distance from a potentially venomous snake and it's like going to the carnival, but instead of throwing balls at weighted bottles, you throw jagged rocks at 6ft spitting cobras. Anyway, I ran over started throwing rocks too. The snake started bolting down the hill headed for heavy brush so I picked up a huge stone from our driveway and chasing after it I threw it on it's back, pinning it to the ground. It turned towards us and stood up, flared its hood and spat venom at us. Which made it easy to identify as a spitting cobra. Finally after a dozen more rocks we chopped the head off with a hoe. I took the dead snake to our hut and had a sober talk with the kids about cobras. Then the day before yesterday Joe and Richard killed another cobra while I looked on with a large stick in case he came out of his hole where they were chopping with a pick axe. This one was dead when we got it out of the ground. Killing two cobras in a week and one of them only 100 ft from my front door is disturbing. So we are on a snake killing program right now. We burned the pit where they love to live. Then we had a bulldozer level the pits. Normally cobras run in mated pairs so we're hoping we got a pair and not two out of four. Pray for a snake free month of June!