An explosion!

"What was that?!" ....  I called out, after an extremely loud bang in the front room.

"It was an explosion!" ....  an electrical explosion!" ... exclaimed Issa.

"What made it? .... "What did you do?"

"It was my gun!"

Where is it?"

Issa just showed me a small bamboo stick.

"Where's the rest of it?"

"Under the sofa!"

Issa rushed outside, and I suspected that he was hiding another part of his gun.

He was very excited and proud of himself, and disappointed that I wasn't sharing his excitement.

To get a suitable reaction from me, when he came back inside Issa said ..... "I think I'll practise lighting a fire now!"


A few minutes before the explosion Issa had been playing with another kind of gun, ...  pushing a pencil back and forth inside a coconut opener with very sharp points at the end, using it as a gun barrel.

The coconut opener on its own had looked dangerous. but what might Issa have used with it?

When Issa came back inside, he looked at the front room ceiling, saying  .... "It nearly hit the light there.!"

He was looking for a hole or mark in the ceiling.

We could see an indentation near the light, but Issa wouldn't tell me what the projectile had been.

Next day he showed me the reassembled gun he had used, with the projectile in place.

It was just a thin bamboo stick with a spring hanging off one end, with a DD battery in the spring.

The bamboo stick was still attached at one end to a bunch of similar bamboo sticks.

I photographed the "gun", but instead of getting Issa to show me how he had used it, I removed and hid the spring.

So Issa reverted to shooting projectiles out of a worn out bicycle pump, but without much force,
and sometimes he makes and plays with trebuchets, successfully shooting objects across the room.