One day the mailbag for my school arrived and it had a call notice for me from the local post office in Nsoko, a tiny peespot “town” about 12 km east of school. That was a first. Normally my mail came to the Peace Corps office in the capital city. I didn’t even know the address of my school. It was some post office box in Manzini, but I had always used the Peace Corps office address with everybody who wrote to me.

The next day was friday, and I had no classes so I hitched over to Nsoko to see what was up. I had not been to Nsoko before. It took me about an hour and a half to get there.

As I stepped down from my last ride and looked around for the post office, all there was to see was the prison, a small building that was the Police station, and a large tree. Large trees were rare in the low veldt of Swaziland where I lived and taught. I marveled at it for a moment. The poor tree had no leaves on it because it was winter after two years of drought, but it rared up from the dusty plain with such skeletal magnificence as to dwarf everything around.

Seeing no post office, I headed over to the Police Station to ask where it might be. As I walked in, the two policemen inside gaped at me in such a startled manner that I stopped and looked behind me to see what they were staring at. Nothing behind me, it was me that they were startled by. By their reaction, I wondered if I was the first American that had ever walked into their police station. Probably.

I smiled at them and asked where the Post Office was. One officer pointed to his left, so I thanked him and went back out of the door. Off the east side of the Police station, a small lean-to type of structure was built, so I walked over to the small window on it, and presented my call notice to the man inside. He ducked down, and then popped up with a package in his hands. I paid him the import duty due on the package, 17% of the declared value on the form filled out by the person mailing the package, and walked back to the road with it.

There was no traffic in sight that I could hitch back to my school, so I went over to the big tree, beneath which a man was squatting. I greeted him and asked when the next bus was coming by going west. He thought for a minute, and said that it would probably be coming along in about 4 hours. Oh. So I took a seat beside him in the dust under the tree, and waited for a car or truck to come by so that I could hitch it. As I waited, the policemen came out of the station, locked the door, and took off in their patrol pickup truck. The post office guy also came out and locked his door, and walked off into the bushveldt.

The man asked what my package was. I looked at the return address and told him that it appeared to be something from my dad in Tennessee. He asked where Tennessee was. A place in America, I replied. There was no way to explain that more clearly to a swazi man out in the bush.

Just then, the dark clouds overhead let loose, and it started raining. At first it was just a light rain, and as it was warm, we paid no attention to it, and just hunkered down. Since there were no leaves on the tree, it provided minimal shelter, and there was nowhere else to go except the prison, which I doubted would allow us shelter from the rain.

As we squatted there getting wet, the rain became more forceful. Quite a bit more forceful, and before long, the man and I were totally soaked. I watched anxiously for traffic, hoping to get out of there before I drowned. The dirt road in front of us turned into a muddy stream. I heard a car coming, so I leaped up and stood by the road in the pouring rain with my thumb out. No dice, the car sped by without stopping. I went back to the base of the tree and squatted by the man again, taking advantage of its minimal protection.

The rain became hail, and I squatted there, blinking as the hailstones crashed into my head and arms. I was considering walking over to the prison and begging for shelter. It became so uncomfortable that I ripped open the package, which turned out to be a large flashlight in a cardboard box. I tore open the box, and tore it in half, and gave half the cardboard to the man, and we both put our little square of cardboard over our heads to soften the impact of the hailstones. It helped a little.

After about 15 minutes a small pickup truck came along the road, and I stood in the hail with my thumb out. Amazingly, it stopped, sliding about 30 feet in the mud and ice, and the man and I jumped into the back. The cab was full of people already, so we squatted down behind the cab in the truck bed, and the driver took off down the road. As we gained speed the hail was like a storm of bb’s, and we crouched there suffering, hoping that we would drive out from underneath the storm soon.

It finally stopped hailing, and as we came to the intersection of roads near my school, I whapped the top of the truck cab with the flat of my hand, and the driver stopped to let me off, and then drove on into the rain. I walked the last rainy kilometer to my school, and got to my house in the teachers quarters just at dark, where I got out of my soaked clothes and muddy shoes, and towelled off and put on dry clothes.

I sat down and took a look at what my dad had sent me. It was a fancy schmancy flashlight with a big white light on one end, and a yellow blinky light on an extendable arm, and a red light on the end opposite the white light. Along the handle was an inset fluorescent light bar. I dried it off and put in the included batteries, and tried it out. The fluorescent light was nice, and I could see how much better that would be for grading papers by, than the candles that I usually used. As I was exploring my new flashlight, a knock came on my door, and in walked my immediate neighbor, the Science teacher Mr Ndwandwe.

Ndwandwe: Maseko! I saw lights going off and on in your windows and came to see what the lights were. They were so bright!

Me: Hi Ndwandwe. My father sent me this fancy flashlight.

I handed it to him, and he spent 15 minutes switching on and off all the functions of the flashlight, and exclaiming in delight. Eventually he calmed down and went back to his house to go to bed.

A couple days later I was sitting on my stoop talking with the only other expatriate teacher at my school, Mr. Ankahma, who was from Ghana. He was explaining that in Ghana, a man’s middle name was the day of the week that he was born. His name was Elvis (because his mom had heard music by Elvis Presley and liked it) Kofi Ankhama. Kofi being Friday in Ghanaian. As we talked, I felt something brush against my back. I thought it might be the raggedy cat that had been hanging around the teachers quarters, for which I had been putting out food because it looked like it was starving. So far it had been unwilling to come near me to let me pet him. I stood up to see if it was him behind me, and was stunned to see a spitting cobra snake, all rared up with its hood extended, and ready to spit its venom on me.

In less than a second I somehow levitated about 8 feet backwards in fright. The snake’s head was waving back and forth. Ankahma leaped to his feet and ran off into the dusk, shouting “Inyoka! Inyoka!”, the siSwati word for snake. Some of the teachers came running out of their houses, to see what was going on. Ankahma came running back with a large stone in his hands, and he threw it at the snake. Which really pissed off the snake. It slithered angrily down off the stoop and along the side of my house. Teachers came running up with more stones, and eventually they killed the snake.

I had never seen a spitting cobra up close before, and after ascertaining that it was, in fact, dead, I went over and picked it up, grabbing it behind the head. As I did that, there was a rushing sound behind me, as the teachers ran back away from me. The snake was about 5 feet long, and kind of pretty.

“Put it down! Put it down!” the teachers were shouting. So after looking at it well, I put it back down. The teachers came back with sticks and grass and started a fire, and once the fire was going pretty good, used a stick, and tossed the snake carcass on the fire and watched it burn up.

Me: Ndwandwe, why are you burning up the snake?

Mr. Ndwandwe: We are burning it up so that the spirit of the snake will not come back and haunt your house, Maseko.

Me: My house? I did not kill him. You all killed him. His death was not my fault.

About a week later, right at sunset, I heard a man shouting outside of my house. It was Mr. Ndwandwe, who had been walking up to the primary school for the Wednesday night Christian services that he led.

Ndwandwe: Maseko! Maseko! Come quickly and bring your big torch! Hurry!

Torch was what Swazis called a flashlight, so I grabbed my new fancy flashlight, and ran outside. Mr. Ndwandwe was standing beside my house looking down at the grass in some agitation. I ran over to him, and there in the grass was the twin to the snake they had killed the week before. Mr. Ndwandwe was hitting the snake with a large stick. As I shined the light on the snake, other teachers came up, and again threw rocks, killing the snake. And again they built a fire to throw the snake into. As we were standing around watching the snake burn, Funda Dlamini, the english teacher, came over to talk with me.

Funda: Maseko, that was the other snake’s wife, who came to bite you for killing her husband.

Me: Hey, wait a minute. I did not kill her husband. You all did.

Funda: That does not matter. It was at your house that the other snake was killed. She was coming for you.

There seemed to be something wrong with that logic, but it was no use disagreeing with her. Though I wondered if the snake’s children would also come to avenge their parents death, nothing more ever happened. I guess I escaped that fate.

The flashlight became a thing of pride and various teachers borrowed it as time went on. No one had ever seen anything like that fancy schmancy light.

Thanks, Dad.

Sometimes life in Africa seemed like I was in the Twilight Zone.