Media Missionary Focus

Electro-Shock Therapy for Snakes (and other Animal Planet moments)

Yesterday, as I drove down a back road to our studio, I saw something that I hadn’t seen in a long; a man with a car battery on his back.

As I’ve said a number of times before, Cambodia has changed drastically since we first came here in January 1994. Back then, we would see things that just made you stop and stare. Of course, some of those things are still around, but we have just gotten used to them and we don’t notice as much anymore. But many things you just don’t see anymore. For example, one of my favorite Cambodia media related moments was when I first saw a public service message on TV telling people not to fish with hand grenades! I haven’t seen that in years! Another one that I haven’t seen in a long time is the electro-snake-fishing.

In this particular Cambodian “sport” the “snake fisher” straps on a backpack that has a small shelf on it. Sitting on the shelf is a large car battery. Attached to the positive and negative battery terminals there are two wires that extend to two long metal poles (I haven’t looked at them very closely, but I believe they also have some rubber strips wrapped around the end as hand holds). The person then wades into a rice patty or drainage ditch that is likely to contain small water snakes and puts the two ends of the metal poles in the water to shock any nearby snakes and bring them to the surface. They collect the snakes and cook and sell them. I don’t believe I have ever seen this particular method of sports fishing taught in a Royal Ranger book or at Boy Scouts or anything, but once you’ve seen it you don’t easily forget it!

At the airport this morning (on our way to a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand) Lisa was reading the newspaper and came across an article that once again brought up a host of memories.

When we used to live and work at the orphanage we had a house that was next to a swampy field, so we would get all sorts of odd animal visitors. We would find four foot long snake skins in the spare bedroom, live poisonous vipers in the living room or on the car porch, black widow spiders under our dining room table top, and all sorts of assorted mystery animals throughout the house that we would just kill and get rid of without ever knowing what they were. On our first furlough, we were watching a National Geographic special one day called “Living Nightmares” that focused on various poisonous nocturnal predators. As we watched were recognized over half of the creatures featured as being among the many animals we had killed in our house!

A couple months ago, just shortly before Lisa got our cat, I had killed a “rat” in our hallway (after a bit of a chase through three different rooms with a golf club). But it wasn’t like any rat I had ever seen. It had a strange pointed and tapered face and a oddly thick tail, but, I knew it wasn’t a mouse, so it was labeled as “rat” in my mind. But as Lisa was reading the paper this morning, she suddenly turned to me and said, “Remember that weird rat you killed? Did it look kind of like this?” And she proceeded to show me a half-page drawing in the paper that looked surprisingly familiar. “Yeah, I think that’s it!” I said. It turns out the article was about some animal specialist who found a previously un-cataloged species of rodent being sold in a market in Laos, and that was what had been in our house! Animal Planet hasn’t got anything on us!

So now we are in Bangkok, Thailand for about a week for a retreat. Here you still see some odd animal things. What other major city do you know where you can walk down the street and see elephants on the side walk? Sometimes you just have to stop and remember what an amazing world we live in and what amazing opportunities God brings our way.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 7:42 PM