Snake!

You can tell the rainy season is slowly approaching. The frequency of the rain is increasing with each week. I think the rainy season officially starts on 15 April, but the past two days have been very wet and windy. Last night the winds knocked over our fence at the house and knocked over a lot of trees in the area. Today marks the "1 month to go" at the team site. Ill be leaving for check out in Monrovia on 26 April. Woohoo! That time cannot come pass enough. We have all members of my team back at the side, so we are at full strength. We also are receiving a Ghanaian Captain next week. Our teammate from Jordan came down with Malaria yesterday so he is at the Bangladesh hospital recovering. But everything is still going smoothly in Liberia. Here are some pics:

Liberia is in full swing with the cashew and mango season. Above is a cashew tree located outside our office. I have not tried the fruit yet, but it supposedly very sweet and good. We have collected some of the nuts, dried them and ate some. They were tasty. You can also eat the leaves, which my Malaysian teammate makes a lot of in his dishes me makes.

This is the cashew fruit. You can see at the bottom where the cashew nut is.

I think we are in pineapple season too. You can find plenty of people selling pineapples on the side of the road. I bought these three for 150 LD (~$2). One day we returned to the office from a patrol and we see the security guards burning two large palm trees right outside our office door. They said they saw 2 snakes in the tree and were going to burn the trees to flush them out. So I ran to the office to collect my camera and waited with them to see these jumping snakes. We waited for 2 hours but no snakes ever came out. They thought they were burned and were dead. I told them that if they found it/killed it, to bring it by the office so I can see it. The next day one of them brought me this beauty. He said he saw it crawling on the palm and so he shot and killed it with his sling shot! They called this a yellow snake but I looked it up in a Liberia book that I have and it closely resembles a Jameson Mamba, which has neurotoxic venom. After the photo op I gave it back to him. He chopped the head and tail off with his machete and put it in his backpack to eat later for dinner. The other snake, which they said was the bigger one, is still unaccounted for.

I dont know what the deal is but these past few months have revealed a lot of snake activity in Liberia. This snake was about 6 feet long. No big deal.Today we visited with the Gbarnga Drug Enforcement Agency. This is the DEA chief's office (grey shirt). After we were done talking he took us back to the drug warehouse where they store all the drugs that they confiscate. He had mostly marijuana but showed us some cocaine as well. This is a jug that they hide drugs in to pass through checkpoints. Here are two large bags of marijuana they confiscated this past week. He said each bag weighs 60 kg, which is about 135 lbs.