I'm looking for a small intestine!

‘We can’t do practical work or make charts in science – we haven’t got any equipment’. Such was the refrain I kept hearing from all the primary science teachers I worked with when I first arrived in the Gambia and I had heard it many times before in other countries. So it was necessary for me to show that lots of experiments could be done using the everyday materials around them. My search for an intestine was being carried out in my garden on the cliff, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

I was in the process of making a chart of the human digestive system with local materials and had done very well with a variety of sticks, seeds and grasses, half a coconut husk for the stomach and a wonderful jacaranda pod for the large intestine, but the small intestine was proving a challenge. I would have to forage further. However I was a little cautious when going beyond my garden, as there was a large python that lived in the small creek at the side of my house. Apparently it mostly fed on the rats and other creatures that came to gorge on the spoils from the beach café just below the cliff.

Suddenly, in the middle of my foraging, my neighbour sent his gardener round to show me where the python was if I was interested. I followed Lansana down a very narrow track into the dry creek, which was full of long grass and thick leafy bushes. Before long he stopped, held back some leaves and pointed. There, piled up in the grass, was the python. I was anxious to get closer for a better look and slowly worked my way to within 2 or 3 yards of it. It was about 14foot long, though most of it was coiled up at the time, and I could not have fitted my hands round the girth of the widest part. I was surprised that the local villagers, given their usual attitude to snakes, hadn’t killed it but apparently it had taken on a special status and was actually protected by them. It was not exactly of South American anaconda proportions but quite big enough to satisfy me.

Thanking the gardener I returned from the creek and continued my search. I lifted up a large waxy green leaf draped on the ground and out scuttled a beautiful, if rather hairy, spider that could have just fitted into the my palm of my hand. Not much use to me in this case. At the base of a pawpaw tree I found a stalk from the pawpaw tree leaf but, though very serviceable as a straw, it was a bit straight for some intestine. Then, looking under the flowering hibiscus bush, I was distracted by an enormous chameleon. It was about 10in long and the biggest one I had ever seen. It also moved rather faster than most though I still had plenty of time to watch its extraordinary gait as it, in turn, studied mine – from two different angles.

Then I spotted what appeared to be a rather unusual creeper. On closer inspection it was a long twisted bundle of cassette tape discarded in the bushes. After something of a nature trail I had found my small intestine, at the same time cleaned up the environment and had had another Blue Peter moment.