17:56, Sunday, 24 June, 2012

It feels like forever since I’ve written!  The rain forced us to slow down today, offering the perfect opportunity to catch up a bit.  It’s unusual that it should rain during the day in Africa, but today it has rained all day apart from about an hour of the sun gasping for breath.  I FINALLY got all caught up on my transcriptions, which feels marvelous.

Arietti.  Unfortunately, the tale has an unhappy end (something I was not yet aware of when I prefaced it), but I think it’s a good tale nonetheless.  The night before I last wrote, we drove to Talek to do some errands in the evening.  The town has such a different feel in the evening – really lovely .  The children were out of school, playing marbles in the dirt and wheeling about their little homemade toys.  The air was calm, everyone starting to wind down, the sun casting long shadows across the trash, dust, donkeys, chickens, dogs, little shops and alleys with hanging clothes.  A drunken man in Bel Mara (Mama Kristie’s shop) held up a carrot and asked me what it was.  We gave little David the stuffed elephant from Nairobi Michelle and I went halfsies on; he had no idea what to do with it!  Come to think of it, I have never seen a toy in Talek.  Never.  Only the homemade ones, marbles, tires – funny how content the kids are.  You’d think they didn’t need a million two toys to keep them happy or something.  Still, hopefully David figures it out enough that our elephant makes him smile.  And I bet when he does that elephant will be loved to dirty slobbered pieces.

While we waited for Eli to take care of something or another, and most of our errands were done, Nora, Michelle, and I played peek-a-scare out the car windows with Caroline and Juliet (two of the girls from the other day) and a whole cohort of other kids.  After a while, Caroline looked thoughtful at the hyena research decal on our car.  “Someone poured oil on a bird,” she suddenly said.  I didn’t understand, and told her I was very sorry for the bird.  I later realized the hyena decal had caused her to connect us with animals - we must be people who care about animals.  Eli came out and sent Nora and I ducking through short alleys to find some meat for Joseph, Jackson, Wilson, etc.  When we came back, Eli was holding a baby bird, a sort of black swift with white painted across the tail, that some monster had actually poured oil on.  Caroline said it was no accident, and the poor thing was barely alive.  Who would EVER do such a thing?!  It’s darn lucky for that person I don’t know who he is.  But the big group of kids had led Michelle over to a small tree by an auto garage, where a two-chambered nest (the most elaborate nest I’ve ever seen – it had two separate rooms!  Wealthy bird family I guess) with the bird’s sibling aboard had been removed from its original location and placed on a branch.  The kids wanted us to save it.  We talked it over as the ten or so kids stood poking their faces through the car windows.  It was doubtful the mother would be able to find it, and we were going to try and help the oiled one anyhow.  Kay didn’t hesitate to say we should bring them home, so it was decided.

On the bumpy ride back, we went through about a bajillion names, finally deciding on Siri (“secret” in Swahili) for the oiled one, and Arietti for the healthier one.  They made not a peep the whole drive home.  For once in our lives we forgot dinner as we rushed about getting pipettes of water, and  pried their mouths open.  I brought out some soap and worked for a long time trying to wash the oil off of Siri with dishsoap, water and q-tips, trying to remember the methods I was taught while washing oiled turtles from the Kalamazoo River spill (why must our world run on such a harmful substance?).  But birds are endotherms, and although I had Siri tucked in my sweatshirt pocket all through dinner, trying hard to keep her warm, she died shortly afterwards.  Sometimes I wonder if I hope too hard – everyone told me it was useless, but somehow I still thought maybe she would be okay.

So began the adventure of raising Arietti.  As we voiced our need for bugs, which neither Michelle or I could bear to kill, Kay wielded the flyswatter and excitedly proclaimed, “I’ll kill something!”  She swatted at the great gathering of moths on the tent awning, and soon Arietti was falling asleep after a big meal.  I took her to my tent, where she slept in her nest within a box under my bed for the night.  I awoke at one am to her peeping, and a great smile spread across my face when I remembered. I pulled her out of the box and held her, opening her mouth and feeding her some moths we had stored in a cup, pipetting water in afterwards as I held her beak open.  I had to shed my pajama top because she left a great present there whilst I played mother bird.  At last she fell back asleep and I returned her to the nest.

The next few days, Arietti was Michelle and my adopted kid, with some help from Eli, Tyler, Ian, and Nora as well.  Arietti rode around everywhere in my pocket.  While I still had trouble killing things, luckily Michelle lost her qualms, walking around holding the fly swatter high and a mug to catch the falling moths in.  “Watch yourself, Kay!”  “Heads up, guys!”  Moths falling on the table in every direction.  Joseph and Jackson, Wilson, Lasingo and Steven even got in on the fun, although Jackson couldn’t bring himself to kill moths either.  He suggested we just feed Arietti to the genet, obviously catching onto the predictable reaction that my dad and grandpa go through great pains to elicit.  We’d wake up in the morning and our big burly askaris would have spent a portion of the night catching moths.  A couple days in I discovered that Arietti would open her mouth in great gobbly hunger if you touched the side of it, and we realized we needed something other than moths for a more balanced diet.  The hilarity – I stood out in the sunny driveway with my arms out as Michelle swatted flies that landed on me.  Once I misunderstood where she said a fly was when she asked me if she could swat it (we were desperate), and just answered “sure,” at which point she swatted me in a most unfortunate place and I jumped over in surprise just as Joseph was walking up the driveway.  I don’t even want to know what he thought was going on, and we could hardly explain because we were laughing so hard in between Michelle’s profuse apologies.

We even saved a parasitic lion fly in a test tube off of one of the hyenas we darted.  This is when I purposefully killed something other than a mosquito and the ticks on Obama for the first time I can remember.  Lion flies are fast, so I stood with the fly swatter in baseball bat position as Michelle tentatively opened the test tube.  I felt horrible, but I told myself I could do it.  One whack and it would be dead, it wouldn’t suffer.  WRONG.  I whacked that thing over ten times, and it just wouldn’t die!!!  We lost it after three whacks – I looked desperately for it on the ground so I could squish it out of suffering, but somehow it had ended up on Michelle’s shirt, to be found crawling around right as rain about five minutes later.  Back on the table – whack whack whack!  Still crawling.  Whack whack whack WABAM!  Still wiggling!  What kind of unearthly creature was this?  Its legs were still slightly moving when we fed it to Arietti. Needless to say that was the last of Arietti’s meals I contributed to harvesting.

Arietti had such personality.  She loved it when you would stroke her head, falling asleep immediately.  She loved sitting in the cup of your hand and burrowing into small nooks and crannies in your sweatshirt, once wiggling all the way up to try and burrow down in Michelle’s neck.  When we would put her in her box she would fuss around until we picked her up, at which point she was immediately content, clearly spoiled.  The others shook their head at Michelle and I when we would feed her, saying they should really take a video for youtube as we crooned over her, praising her every time she opened her mouth, so excited, Michelle’s accented “Good girl!” above the din of dinner conversation.  Well, we were excited, starting to think she might actually make it and we’d have a bird to add to our genet and bushbabies – possibly some company for breakfast as well as dinner!  Then, well, we got the call from Eli while returning from Prozac territory that she had died.  We think she probably got too cold while we were away, because she had eaten just fine that morning.  Goodbye, Arietti.  But I’m SO GLAD we got to know you, that we tried.