In the forest today (June 28), Katie got attacked by a swarm of wild wasps. This happened while we were both trying to locate Gangster’s feces, a juvenile male monkey in group B2 who had just defecated at the base of a tall tree, which apparently was home for a hive of wild African wasps. Evidently, Katie and I have no twisted desire to look for colobus crap - we need Gangster’s pooh for fecal samples which we can later analyze in the genetics lab. As we searched blindly for a tiny brown blob amongst a blanket of wilted brown leaves and brown dirt and brown twigs, in poor light conditions (yes, the old expression “it’s like looking for a needle in a hay stack” applies here) Katie began shaking her head, flailing her arms around, and screaming like a crazy person – or like someone who was being stung by angry wasps. As we both fled away from the bee-hosting-tree as fast as our obruni legs would take us, the monkeys above our head were equally shocked at the sudden outburst. They panicked, we panicked, the wasps panicked, and several minutes later I was trying to pick out the remaining wasps out of Katie’s hair and watching the spots where she was stung get redder and more swollen by the second. She later told me that she could hear their buzzing around her head and that they all began to sting her when she tried swatting them away.
The strange thing is that I wasn’t stung once by the angry bees… Either I have very good luck or Katie has incredibly bad luck (first she sprained her ankle at the post office, and then she had malaria and now this “incident”). Maybe she’s like the guy in that French movie “La Chevre” who only has horrible luck in everything he does, with comical results and hilarious consequences. At least Katie can laugh through it all and continue to stay positive each day. Pretty admirable I think!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment