1/31
Hello there family and friends!! So, the title of this blog kind of gives you an idea of the little tale I’m about to tell, a tale of great adventure.
So one of the things we did in our time here in Mozambique with Africa on Fire Ministries was help clean up the inside of a building they’re currently using as they’re church that will eventually be a boys home. Along with cleaning the inside I and some others were outside clearing brush away from the building so there was a big clear patch in front of it as well as room to walk on either side, now I enjoyed it quite a bit because we were constantly finding fun new little animals that I had never seen before like different beetles, centipedes, frogs… and a cool little snake. I was taking these weeds and plants that had been chopped out of the ground and I see a little black tail scurry into the brush so I get down and start to brush through the pile to find it after it disappears and end up losing it not knowing where it went, later in that same area someone yells , “A snake!!”. The first thing that runs through my mind is REDEMPTION. Excitedly I run over and catch the little dude as he tries to burrow into the red sand . It’s a little black snake with a silver belly, he’s a little less than a foot long and slender. As soon as I have him in my hands and I’m holding him letting him crawl through my fingers and examining him, one of the local young adults that had been with us this whole month, Antonio, was pleading with me to drop it because it’s dangerous. Antonio looks like the grim reaper with a ho for this poor little snake, so clearly if you’re reading this and you know me, I don’t drop the snake. I’m used to going out with my dad in the US catching “killer, blood thirsty poisonous snakes” that end up just being little harmless ball pythons or something, so I guess I was a little biased when he told me it was poisonous (Justice for harmless snakes!). I tell him I’m just going to let it go in the bushes and he can’t kill it though I still see him cocking his ho so it’s ready for its next kill as soon as the snake leaves my fingers. While I’m explaining to him the snake is harmless because it’s just been crawling through my fingers chillin this whole time, it bites me right on the joint where my thumb connects to my hand. I drop the snake and immediately I knew it wasn’t a good bite. I start to squeeze the bite and suck on it a little in case the bite is poisonous. After a minute or so I can feel it’s not a regular snake bite and I feel the pain spreading away from my thumb so I say it’s probably a swell idea to make our way to the nearest clinic or hospital. I hold my hand over my head to slow the blood flow and as we’re walking the minute it or so walk back to the main part of the compound to grab my passport and a car and money I notice just the slightest bit of discoloration at the point of the bite, just a little blackish purple. Then I knew for sure it was a poisonous snake bite because my cells were dying and I was losing some movement in my hand. We finally dug the things I needed out of my pack in my tent and went to the trucks but would you know it. No one was there that had the keys to the vehicles, they were all gone. Okay next option, flag a car down on the road. This compound is a short drive from a small city but we’re pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We start to make our way to the road which is another 2-3 minute or so walk, at this point I was viewing every minute as crucial, needless to say at that point I was stressing just a tad. We get my teammate Bill’s jacket and use it as a tourniquet for my arm and tie it around my forearm. We get out the gate and wouldn’t you now it, there’s a car sitting right there outside the gate, a guy had stopped and was checking out his car literally right out front of the gate… thanks God you rock. The woman we were with named Rodiña (She’s so awesome) asks if we can get a ride to a clinic and it’s an emergency. So a few of us pile into this guy’s car and start booking it at a whopping 45 miles an hour to what I thought was going to be the nearest clinic. We finally get into town after about 10 minutes or so. My shoulder is starting to hurt from holding my arm up this whole time but I decide a little shoulder pain is doable at this point. So we get into town and I see us drive straight past a clinic and I turn to Rodiña and say we just passed the clinic and she says she doesn’t like that one it’s not as good as the one we’re going to a few more minutes down the road. After she said that I started planning out what I wanted my mechanical arm to look like. Maybe some bedazzling, obviously complementary colors. Maybe each finger a different color. We finally got to the clinic and we thanked the guy and bolted out of the car and there was a huge line at the clinic I run up and Rodiña tells them I got bit by a snake, they let me skip the line. Score. They put an actual tourniquet on my arm and start to prep an IV. At this point I can’t move my hand, it hurts like a pulsing pain I wish on no man and the black has spread a little more, BUT at least I was finally at the clinic so I felt better. They stuck me with an IV to flush my system and gave me a dose of anti-venom. After that they had me lay on a bed in the clinic so they could watch it for the next hour to see how it was doing. The blackness stopped spreading and the swelling slowed down as well. So I ended up being able to leave after some paper work and paying 5 MTZ which is Mozambique currency, and to give you an idea of how cheap it was, 72 MTZ is one American dollar. It took about two weeks and a lot of swelling in my hand and arm but I’m able to use my hand to just about it’s fullest capacity now!! Overall God totally had my back on that one. Thanks to The Big Man!! Now at least I’ll hopefully have a cool scar and an even cooler story to tell. Still don’t regret not putting the snake down.
I’ll be posting pictures to the blog soon!!
