Now, Sere was an intelligent spider and he tried many tricks and moved to many spots always hoping for a dizzy fly: tree tops and rock cracks, earth mounds and shrub leaves, but no flies came by and he grew hungrier and hungrier.
The land was arid and the sun was hot and Sere did not like to sit under the burning sun. But the land Sere had known his lifelong only knew sun and so Sere looked for shade wherever he could.
One day as he crouched and waited he started wondering if there was anything other than sun, perhaps in another land. Something that brought coolness like the night did. And the more he thought the more he grew convinced that there must be. Rain he called it. But as he named it he also realized that if this rain would always fall he, Sere the fly-spider, would be even hungrier because dizzy flies don't fly when it rains.
"Hmmm", he thought, "if I could eat grass and have long legs to jump from one leaf of grass to the other then I would be a happy jumpy spider."
That day when the sun disappeared behind the horizon and Sere fell asleep, rain began to fall and wet the land and the land began to change. Grass began to grow where there had been only dust. And Sere too began to change - his legs, his eyes, his body.
The morning came and as Sere woke up he smelt the wet earth and crawling hungrily from under the rocks he looked around - he was in the midst of a sea of green! He was hungry and began to eat when all of a sudden he realized that he, a fly-spider, was eating grass! He stopped chewing, a little leaf hanging from his jaw, examined himself and spitting out the little leaf he cried "I have lost two legs!". Panic seized him and up he jumped! Higher and higher he rose and then faster and faster he fell. "Help" he screamed - but then nothing happened. He was safe on another leaf of grass, close to a grasshopper.
"I have lost two legs!" he screamed at the grasshopper.
"No you haven't", replied the grasshopper.
"But I should have eight legs!", cried Sere.
"You've been eating too much weed" replied the grasshopper, "spiders have eight legs and you're a grasshopper. Now let me be, I'm hungry." And with that the grasshopper jumped away.
A grasshopper? I'm a grasshopper? Sere looked again at himself and indeed he was a grasshopper. A grasshopper! "I need a new name" he thought, "Hmmm...Geti, yes! I will be Geti the grasshopper!"
And so it came to be that in the land of endless sun and endless rain, with each change of season, Sere the spider became Geti the grasshopper and the land came to be known as Sere 'n Geti.
Tanzania...
