26/2/1015

One day, back in January, I made for a tiny settlement in the bush. A settlement consisting of few dusty shacks in the shadow of a lonely rocky hill - Ndumuru - located some 30 kilometers West from my little town.

I doubt you can find it on any map. It’s only been established a couple of years ago when the government renewed a well in the middle of a bushy nowhere to provide nomadic herdsmen with a source of  water. The well had initially been dug by Britons under a programme of bush elephant conservation. Before long, winds of austerity measures had started to blow in Great Britain, hence no money for maintenance of the well. It hadn’t taken long for the construction to become a ruin.

But as I mentioned the well had been renewed. Once herdsmen were enabled to use water from the well, they settled down with their families and started the settlement of Ndumuru.

It takes about 1,5 hour by a reliable 4x4 along an untarred sandy track to arrive at Ndumuru. As soon as you leave the green hills of my town behind, you hit desolate savannish area. You won’t meet people on the way, unless someone from Ndumuru trudges wearily along the dusty track, making their way to or from the town. Visits to the town are rare as it takes roughly 6 hours walking in boiling heat and swirling dust. If you’re lucky, you may catch a ride with a suspicious lorry which most likely smuggles something from Ethiopia or Sudan.

That day I decided to visit Ndumuru to conduct a research for the purpose of my master thesis. I’m collecting data on people’s perception of nature and I thought it would be quite interesting to introduce a variable “distance to the nearest town”. To diversify my sample I surveyed people from towns and villages around the towns. The only thing I needed was interviews with people who live far away from towns, people who hardly ever step on tarmac roads, people who don’t have a slightest access to electricity, people whose nights are breathtakingly dark and starry for there is no light pollution in the radius of at least 30 kilometers and, last but not least, people who still put great emphasis on the traditional ecological knowledge rather than information about ecosystems one learns at school.

Traditional ecological knowledge of Meru people is to a great extent based on senses.
 
The main foreign language children in Ndumuru learn is to understand birds. These little colorful creatures can tell people about the closeness of a snake or, producing different chirp, they will inform shepherds about a lion approaching their herd. They can even alert people about a human enemy or a human friend coming. It takes some effort though to become more or less fluent in the language of birds. Good performance can be achieved through spending considerable amount of time with the native speakers.

It’s quite unlikely that you have ever asked yourself a question “what does a poisonous snake smell like?” Whether you have inquired about it or not, here’s the answer:
It might be different for each type of snake, but what I know, is that a puff adder, the deadliest of ‘em all, reeks of ripe bananas. The smell is so prevalent in the area where the snake resides, that an experienced person would certainly not make any step further. It’s also because the experienced person would know that snakes like cobras or puff adders are extremely aggressive. In the famous scheme ‘fight or flight’, they always choose the first option. Heavily armed in deadly poison (puff adder's venom can kill an adult man in as much as 30 minutes) they usually jump high from the ground aiming in their enemy’s eyes. It seems to be a very successful technique for poisonous snakes, feared by the locals, are not under any threat of extinction in the nearest future, unlike their other wild cousins such as African wild dogs or elephants.

What is more about the puff adder is that it loves human milk. Odd as it may sound, locals claim it’s true. They recall incidents of a snake visiting a baby at home just after it was left alone after being fed by it’s mother.

Just one more lesson, which can serve well in the predacious jungle of many a workplace too: never show fear.
When encountering a big wild cat such as a lion or a cheetah, don’t turn your back to them, don’t you even try to run away. Stand still. Keep calm and proud. Never show fear.
If gods are on your side, nothing bad will happen.

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