Lizards, Rhino's and Giraffes! Oh My!

Greetings world. My name is Emmanuel Ike and I will be telling you about my second week in Senegal in hopefully at least 500 words. This Sunday we went on a “Safari” and saw a lot of interesting animals. Which I may show in this blog. All animals except for the crocodiles and panther are plant eaters and seemed pretty harmless. The ostriches were the most fearless. They didn’t want to move away from the truck we rode in. We saw Giraffes, and Rhino's and even Zazu from Lion King, which is a Hornbill bird.

The rest of my week ran very smoothly and it was rather uneventful until Tuesday night Wednesday morning. That night I was having a very pleasant dream about how I was working towards enabling world peace and ending world hunger when suddenly I heard a scream. AAAhhh!!!. I assumed it was a lady in my dream so I went to go see what was wrong until I heard the scream again followed with “Help!!!” So when I heard this, I flung the mosquito net out of the way, jumped out of bed, grabbed my flashlight, slipped on my slippers, and wore a sweater as I propelled myself out of my door looking for danger. When I went into the hallway, I saw the guardian from downstairs at the door of the damsel. He seemed just as confused as I was. So from his hand gestures and little French I knew he told me to call the damsel’s name and try to figure out what was wrong. So I called for the damsel and asked what was wrong and The damsel simply replied, “I can’t move!” So I started thinking about all the reasons as to why the damsel would reply in such a way while using google translate to communicate with the guardian. [For the remainder of this story we will call the guardian Bob and the damsel Rebecca.] I tell Bob that she can’t move so we then decide the next thing to do is to try and open the door. We later figure that the door is locked and the only people that have keys were the custodians that wouldn’t come until next morning. Somewhere along the line as the damsel’s friends Brittany and later Shantel left their rooms and entered the hallway of confusion we figured out that the cause of panic was allegedly “huge” lizards that were in the damsel’s room. By this time Bob had already tried breaking the door down so he was on his way to trying to get her from the window. So I told Brittany that she had to convince Rebecca to rescue herself from the lizards. Eventually, Bob started banging on the window which scared Rebecca even more so I had to go and find Bob to make him stop. Shantel was very good at encouraging and motivating Rebecca to inch herself closer to the door and then to unlock the door and finally be free from the lizards. When Rebecca finally did that, she ran down the hall faster than Usain Bolt in the Olympics. From that day on, Rebecca gained the ability to sense lizards from yards away and is actively taking precautions to prevent another episode. And so far, after that night, I have had restful nights.