Stories

Nasser was bitten by a snake while working at the farm last summer. He immediately sucked what he could out of the wound, applied a tourniquet to his arm, and was hauled off to Guerrera 30 kilometers away. There was no anti-venom available. As he felt the poison working its way up his arm towards his heart he was hauled to a hospital 120 kilometers away in Ghardaia. There, he spent four days in the hospital in a situation that might best be described as “tenuous”. He said: “it was important not to panic, because that only speeds your circulation”. He lived.

A young man from Guerara spent one holiday zipping around the desert on his motor bike without regard for the possible consequences. It so happened that the electricity went out that night in Guerrera due to some system failure, and so the glow of the town that serves as navigational beacon in the desert was lost. The young man guessed wrong about his directions, headed straight out into the desert instead of towards town, and ran out of gas without any idea about what had happened. It was mid-summer and he had no water and within two days he was dead, just a few kilometers it turns out from “La Source” and salvation.

One of the guys working on the farm was also bitten when he dared to have some fun with a snake he found at the farm. He panicked but had the good fortune to have anti-venom now at the farm, and so also survived. Death is usually a matter of less than an hour.

Snakes and scorpions are commonplace on the farm, but now, in the winter, they are all hibernating. In any case, it is only the snakes that are deadly. The scorpion bite is exceedingly painful, sometimes for days, but it will not kill a full-grown man. I found myself avoiding holes in the sand, covering my boots at night, and kicking rocks before picking them up.

Tourists are usually the protagonists in these death by desert stories, so it was refreshing (?) to hear the more local variations. In any case, staring around at the monochrome dust and remembering the level of tension as we tried to navigate to “La Source” at night, I’m left with a more than theoretical appreciation for the stakes and the consequences out here in the waste.

Nasser making sahara bread