I got lizards on my walls. I'd call them geckos, but I'm not sure geckos change colors. Whatever it is, it hunts:
Geckothing follows moth across wall, jumps (horizontally!) at him, misses. Then, about eight inches apart, swear to god, they stare each other down. Geckothing then springs across wall, and his head is where the moth was, and the moth is flutterin somewhere inside him. Geckothing then walks back behind my roommate's 1936 art deco VISIT PALESTINE tourism poster.
Two hours of research later, I geckothing does the same: hunt a moth across the wall, apparently miss with his first pounce, stare down moth, repounce, chew. Johnnytheory: he clips the moth the first time, slowing it down, then finishes it off.
There's another one in the bathroom--he's gone near translucent against the white paint on the walls--who skitters up halfway across doorway's hanging corner. At which point he just pauses, one lizard paw held indecisively in mid-vertical-step. His skin's like a latex glove: you could see the nerves from his black eyes go back up his into skull. Mr. Creepy Eyes just hanging out in the bathroom, flicking his tongue at you.
My whole neighborhood is like this: monkeys throw sticks at my dog, little gila monster things are always walking across the road, and there's this bizarre plant growing right behind my porch that seems to spread its seeds through tiny explosions, about the volume of a Bang Snap.
Hell, the whole city is like this, but you don't notice the nature off the road so much, because of the crime. Some the nastier sorts live out in the wilderness, so you don't waste time speculating what it's like in there.
No, nature speculation is for inside the gated community. Because there's a gate on it, and behind the gate there are uniformed security guards, and in front of every house in the community there is a spiked fence with dogs behind it (many Kenyans are not comfortable around unfamiliar dogs of any size, for nasty reasons of colonial history), and behind the dogs is the house. The house is designed like a shark cage within a shark cage: all windows and doors have metal bars, and if those bars are breached, there is another internal cage to flee to and lock yourself within.
With all this gate on the brain, it's not surprising that they just built a deli right on the edge of our community. Now you can leave the front gate, walk one hundred paces, get your food, and scamper back in under a minute.
Though it is surprising that the American phenomenon of McMansioning has finally come to Nairobi: down the road: They're building a development for Americans to move into, and it might as well be a new neighborhood outside I-270 in Columbus. One big rolling hill is now covered with the same box house with the same triangle roof.
I'm currently in a neighborhood that's a couple dozen years old. Every house is different, and most are striking in their Kenyan Honkey-style ostentation. But you can hardly tell because every building is behind an 8-foot wall.
The new American compound, on the other hand, looks to have just one big outer wall, with super-security around its perimeter. So it simultaneously feels more neighborhoodish, more cookie-cutted.
I wonder how all those Americans will get their servants. Hey, I got servants and I don't have a job. It offended my Midwestern ideas about work ethic at first, still does at times (today Dina the maid took a break from washing my boxer shorts to ask if she could have a little bit of milk from the fridge for her tea.), but you that your place in the system is to give someone else a job. Washing shirts or tending a garden or making dinner for a mzungu is a coveted paying position. On a scale like this, will the contracts be given out through a formal process that bypasses the slum folk that maintain my house?
This place is just bizarre: half an acre of garden, servants, wildlife, all a box to lock yourself into.
