There's a what in the computer?!

Perhaps the most African thing yet happened during one of my computer classes yesterday. I have 3 classes, back to back, and in the second class, one of the computers wouldn't come on. We had just used it in the previous class, but I am making them practice turning it on, so we turned it off at the end of the first class. One of the students was on it, so I sent him to a different computer while Darran, a westerner from Australia and my very capable assistant, worked on it. The CPU (big box attached to it for my less computer-savvy friends!) was warm, and Darran said it shouldn't be. After a few minutes of investigation, he came and whispered, "Do you have a few minutes for a quick teaching lesson?" I told him yes, and we gathered the students around the computer. He explained that it shouldn't be hot because it has a fan, and he turned the CPU around so they could see the fan. Then he asked if they could smell anything and they said yes, but no one could identify the smell. He asked, "Does it smell like fried lizard?" A lizard had crawled into the fan, been killed, then cooked! After he took out the lizard (I didn't watch that part!), we let the computer cool off, then it worked fine for the next class! Ah, Africa! It was actually a very valuable part of the class, as something similar to that is very likely to happen once they go out to the village schools. Good lesson for me, too: if anything's wrong with the computer, check for lizards!