Eating leaves and lizards to survive in Niger

Famine hit Niger in 1984 and 2005. If you look up "bo" on the Internet, nothing that makes sense comes up. But we were looking at a bo, or rather looking for it. We were walking along the bank of the Niger River, searching for the tracks of a hippopotamus that was ravaging the corn on Karim's farm.

All of a sudden, a lizard about the size of a small crocodile hurtled out of the undergrowth and raced up a nearby baobab tree. "It's a bo," everybody cried, racing to the foot of the enormous tree. Now I had never seen a bo before, so I was interested out of pure curiosity.