I remembered that I had only ever seen a chameleon in a zoo. I liked watching it purposefully stretch out each arm to climb along the branch. Our teachers were amused that we found it so interesting. They let us watch it for a couple of minutes and then hustled us back to language class. The teacher who had caught the chameleon took it carefully out of the garden and brought it to the woods.
About a year ago, I came back from a trip and my garden was over run with weeds. Some grasses had grown as high as my knee! I opened the garden gate and pushed through the tall grass to reach the center of the garden. Suddenly, something heavy and solid (and not very grass-like) brushed against my leg. I jumped back! Staring up at me was a chameleon in a bright, perfectly grass-green color. Fascinated, I watched him as he watched me with his telescope-like eye. I let him be and cleared weeds in another section of the garden. I glanced up a couple of times to see him subtly shift color as he climbed deeper into the shadows of the weeds.
A few days later, my host mom pointed out how some of my vegetables had been chewed. “It’s the lizards! The chameleons! They eat the plants,” she explained. She said she had chased one out for me the other day. A lot of people in my host community treat lizards as pests. They treat them as they would bugs or mice, and they do their best to get rid of them. I didn’t tell her that I had let the chameleon stay in my garden. I did not think she would understand why. Despite the damage to my plants, I found him so interesting looking, almost beautiful, that I did not want to harm him.
In December, I visited Benin, Togo’s neighbor.
