After a year or so in Swaziland, I had read almost all of the paperback books available that were floating around in the informal library among volunteers. Books were necessary when hitchhiking, to pass the time between cars. I needed a new time killer, so I found a nice straight piece of Wattle tree about as big around as my wrist, and 6 feet long, and started carving on it with my pocket knife while waiting for a ride, instead of reading. After a couple semesters, it was looking quite nice from the hours sitting on the side of the road, waiting for a car. There was a snake wrapping around it from top to bottom, with its mouth pointing upward and open, above which I had carved a cage on the end of the stick, and sawed the cage open, and put in a piece of polished jasper that I had brought with me, and glued the cage back together. I found a black sharpie in the office, and had colored the snake with it. In between the wraps of the snake, I had carved elephants, and trees, and birds, and symbols. From the cage on a piece of string, I had hung a small ebony carved Basotho fertility goddess I had found in a market, some feathers that I found while walking around, and a string of colorful beads. It was a lot of fun carving on the walking stick, and it garnered a lot of attention from the people who saw me with it. It looked magical. And magic was big in Swaziland, so it was easy for people to think that the fancy stick must be magic.

One night in downtown Mbabane, a group of volunteers and I were walking back to the technical college where we were all staying, after seeing a movie in the theater. It was 10 at night, and there were not many street lights in the city. In a dark area, a man jumped out of an alley with a big butcher knife in his hand.

“Geev me your shoes!” he shouted, and just to prove how deadly he was, he bent down and scraped the knife back and forth on the cement curb, as if sharpening it.

The group of volunteers were frozen in surprise. I, personally, was not going to give my beat up nikes to anybody, no matter how big their knife was. And the man was not very big. Plus, I had a long fancy stick with rattley things on it, and was betting that the fear of magic would be stronger than the desire for our shoes. Or, at the least, my stick would be something that I could use to keep him away from us. I took a step towards him, and banged the foot of my stick a couple times on the cement street, making the beads rattle, and said in SiSwati, “You should run away little man, or I will put a spell on you.” And amazingly, he did just that. Took off like his tail was on fire. Phew.

We continued on toward the college, up the long hill. Halfway up was a long dark stretch. Just as we drew near the darkest part of the dark area, there came a huge a ruckus from the dark on the right side of the street. It was a loud roaring, and the sounds of something heavy hitting the ground. I could feel the vibrations thru my feet. The hair on my head stood straight up. Just like in the comics. It was the scariest sound I had ever heard. I was in the front of the group, and was frozen in my tracks. The roaring and thumping continued. I turned around to yell “RUN!!!” to the group behind me, only to see that they had taken off at the first roar, and were most of the way back down the hill running lickedy split. All of a sudden a huge dark thing burst into the street, NO! there were two huge dark things! They were roaring and jumping and bashing together, and as they bashed their way across the street, I saw from the backlighting of distant lights that it was two huge bulls, fighting each other. They went off the other side of the street and bashed their way on into the dark. My heart was racing. The danger past, I looked to the other volunteers, and they were gathered way down at the bottom of the hill, under the last streetlight before the dark area. So I took off uphill, since they had so rudely left me to die, and went the rest of the way to the college by myself. I went in, and quickly told the volunteer working there the story, and asked him to not tell the others, when they arrived, that I had gotten there. He laughed and agreed.

15 minutes later the group arrived, and were all abuzz about the scare.

“It was something really huge and loud!”

“Scared the crap out of us!”

“Didn’t Sam tell you about this?”

“Sam? He’s not here. Was he supposed to be?”

“Oh my God! Maybe the beast thing got him!”

“Should we call the police?”

I laughed and came out of hiding, and told them what I had seen. They carped about it, but eventually had to laugh. That Sam, he is some funny guy.

Spitting in the face of death