The Family’s Dog

When it was a puppy, my host sister found a dog with a long gash on its head. She nursed it back to health and begged her family to let her keep it. Today the dog has another scar on it’s forehead, from where the same host sister hit it with a broom handle to get it to move out of the way.

The family’s dog

Dogs have a very interesting place in the village. Some of them have been “adopted”, meaning allowed to sit outside the home and clear the leftovers from plates. Many others wander around unclaimed, fighting other dogs for the chance to lick discarded food wrappers. All dogs are seen as incredibly unclean, and with the difficulties of getting a rabies vaccine, and the snarling fights they get into (sometimes even coming into classrooms and terrorizing students during such a fight), they are viewed as huge nuisances. In my small village alone, there are around 20 wild dogs.

It’s worth noting that all village dogs are considered feral and potentially dangerous. To get the dogs to move or stop doing something, villagers hit or kick them until the dog gets up and moves. I’ve seen someone on a speeding motorcycle slow down enough so he could kick a dog sitting in the middle of the road while swerving around it. Little kids will go up to dogs and start kicking them for no reason. I’ve also seen my family’s dog literally thrown off the side of a cliff when it kept returning to a school meeting room after being ushered out (reappearing five minutes later seemingly just as happy). I will always distinctly remember the scene of a roaring fire in the foreground while a dog gets chased by a man holding a three-foot metal rod over his head (or the sound of that dog when it got hit with the rod).

At the same time, I’ve also seen how much my family cares for the dog. It always astonishes me, because I see such opposite behavior frequently. One night, I got a frantic knock on my door. It was my host sister, asking if I had the dog. When I said I didn’t, she explained that the dog left the porch and hadn’t come back. She concluded, sobbing, “it’s going to be eaten by tigers.”

My host mom and sister were telling me that they think the dog might be pregnant. I said that was unfortunate, because there were already so many dogs without food here. They were actually really offended that I called the village dogs malnourished. I honestly didn’t mean to offend them; it never occurred to me that they think seeing a dog eat grass is normal (they laugh that the dog is hungry enough to be a goat).

One other time, the dog got into a fight with another dog and had a small gash on one leg. My host sister and mother rushed out to the local pharmacy shack to buy medicine for the gash. They spent a lot of money for the area ($1.20) to buy human medicine for the dog. They took turns applying the medicine every few hours for a week.

Regardless of how everyone else views dogs, I’ll still enjoy trying to get the family dog to play fetch.

And here’s an update on my dog bite from my first day here: