Sunday, September 23, 2018

5 Months of Working with Dogs

Yesterday was my last day at the dog refuge for about a month. As I prepare to go on vacation, there were a few things left to do to sort of "round off" the work Carlos and I have been doing for months. As I was leaving, and others left, I got big hugs and lots of "enjoy your rest, you deserve it" comments, which was lovely, but what was even lovelier was that yesterday when I left the refuge I felt genuinely happy and pleased with our work there, and also, yesterday was a reminder that I am not alone in the work we do there, that I am blessed to be amung people with warm hearts and hugs and laughter and shared tears but above all, support.

Learning to mix cement on the ground.
Yes, Carlos is holding a puppy while Catherine and Don Feliciano mix cement.
Someone had to take pictures!

Thanks to Catherine for the door design!


I was trying to think of how long I have been dedicating one day a week to this work, and it has been since around April. Which got me to thinking - what have we accomplished in this time? As much I believe in looking forward, looking back occasionally has benefits as well.

  • Through donations from friends, we delivered 41 bags of food for the dogs. It means we fed the dogs for 20 days. Thank you Bonnie LH, Bonnie T, Jodi S, Erin S, Claire J, Donna M, Bianca A, Donna D, Sue N, Kathy H, Martha S, Trina H... (if I forgot your name, I am SO sorry!)
  • We rebuilt 10 dog enclosures which the municipality had started. This involed wood strips, plastic ties, more sheet metal and about 200 screws and washers, which I donated.
  • We divided the space into 4 distinct areas, allowing us to have capacity for safe intake of new dropped off dogs, and when I come back, having all the dogs inside the enclosures (there are a few who like the feeling of the alfalfa fields under their paws, but they are not safe so, time to leave the open fields behind.
  • I rescued Rico. He is a work in progress and no, won't live with us forever, but until he is eating well and has some weight on him, he'll continue to share the cat beds with Diego and Hilda.
  • I made new connections in my community, and I am honored to be counted as one of these hard working, inspirational group of people.
  • I helped to get dogs adopted, between bringing puppies to homes and people to puppies, they are no longer in the refuge.
New enclosers with doors that lock!

Dog houses for shade, protection from the rain and patios.



Work when I come back:

  • one of the key pieces of work we need to do is to get signage (pricing this out) made for the refuge, so people know how to get there (I spent 40 minutes yesterday driving around the countryside trying to find a couple who had come out and gotten lost). 
  • The second is to get a used grass trimmer - we borrow Carlos's nephew's but we need one that is there. The refuge looks so much better with the grass trimmed, and it is easier to make sure we pick up all the poop. (A second hand grass trimmer was $1300 pesos). 
  • The third is to get our website up and going (hours of work but maybe $10 USD for the domain name per year), so people can be exposed to the work we do at a broader level and also see all the dogs for adoption. they need to know how to donate, what to donate, what projects we have going on, and how to get there if they want to adopt or offer volunteer hours. Also get a GoFundMe page roganized or something similar for people to consider donating to the project.
  • I'll continue to work with APAOAX and Huelas de Ayuda, both run by amazing women, and with them we will build more dog houses, a roof extension for more shade over the patio at Tia Migue's house, capping the "french drain" hole that was dug to allow for some water drainage, partition one other section to allow for five distinct areas for the dogs to be in, and then another roof structure with eaves to collect the rain water into two above ground cistern type reservoirs (tinacos). We're working on that budget now.
  • The fourth will be to figure out how to get the dogs vaccinated. APAOAX can get the vaccinations for less than 200 pesos per dog (C$15 or US$10) but still, with about 100 dogs, that cost adds up. The government changes in December, so maybe the local municipality will be all excited to help??
  • The fifth (but not last because as you all know, there is always work to be done!) is to try to get the bags of food we feed them at a discounted price. Right now we buy them retail, at $297 pesos per bag, and they eat 2 bags of food per day. I'd like to see people's donations go further when they donate money for food.

There is a longer list, but these are the ones that come to mind on this Sunday morning. Yesterday, friends from APAOAX and Huelas started to count the dogs, there are at 87. We've not counted the dogs outside and not all got counted, but 87 is a starting number. We started 6 months ago with no plan. What a difference a day makes.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Dog Refuge Work

I haven't written about the dog refuge work in a while. Although we can all say we are too busy with work or "doing" or catching up on Queen of the South on Netflicks, in truth, sometimes you just need some time to gain some perspective. Sometimes things are not pretty and they make us cry and so we need a little time for the heart to heal before we share it.

We ran several steralization clinics. In all, we had about 20 to 25 dogs spayed or neutered. It was the first clinic I was involved in. The process was amazing. Two vets work side by side doing two dogs at a time. Another vet tech and a helper weigh the dog, give them a shot to knock them out, and shave their little bellies. Before all this gets going, all of us go and round up dogs and check them. If they ahve been fixed, then they get to wear a lovely green ribbon necklace. We had gone before the vets to clean all the kennel spaces we had, so when the dogs were done, they can be laid down on cardboard to rest. Costs - we pay the vets 500 pesos each for their day, drugs are provided y an organization called APAOAX or Huelas de Ayuda, and the rest of the work is volunteer. Near the end of the day they steralized a pregnant female. The doctor's view was that better to have one steralized female than a non-steralized one AND all her pups, so they abort the puppies and fix the female. Paulina, one of the volunteers, burried the unborn babies. She was digging the hole as I drove away, exhausted and emotionally shattered.
Vet doing surgery on Espumita.

This girl was already done.

This little one is in recovery.
We built dog houses. These dogs had barely any shade, so one of the volunteers had an idea to build them dog houses to chill in, get out of the rain and the sun. We built them over four weeks, a total of 20 little chelters, I think. The dogs made me laugh a lot when we were building them. They would be in the little houses before they were built, trying to help with spacing, wood cuting. Those of us who built them laughed a lot, and sweat in the sun, and measured and remeasured and cut and drilled and cut ourselves on sheet metal.

Just Chillin'!

Front patio is a much desired location.

I brought my cousin Bianca to the dog refuge. I am always a little anxious bringing friends and family to the refuge. I pee in a bucket and wear clothes I would be generally OK with tossing out at the end of the day. I have come home with scratches that have gotten infected and left long scars, bite marks, scrapes and usually muddy and smelling like dog poop. The refuge is a long slow process, and I worry that people will come and think: this place is terrible. And it is, in some ways. And in other ways, it is a place where the dogs can live and eat and not be hit by cars or die of starvation. I have had friends cry and others be overwhelmed and stand there and just hold puppies. And then there are others that just love the dogs up while there and help shovel poop and are happy to go and have seen it. Bianca's issue was she only had two hands to love up the dogs, but the third one was happy for a leg hug.
All this puppy love and only two hands!

Are they really lining up for snuggles?

China died. China was my fave little wavy haired shy black furred girl. She would run away from me, but when I eventually caught her, she accepted the snuggle. A dog that went out for adoption, a big black god the adoptive family names Valentin, dies with blood coming out of his nose. He had a respitory infection. They tried antibiotics but waited too long. China had a cough and she died this last week. The vet has been to the refuge and was taking samples. Tia Migue had a cough medicine she has given in the past and I took a pic of the bottle and will wander down to the vet to talk to her today and see what can be done. The dogs are not all vaccinated, nor do they have their rabies shots. Put it on the list of things we need to do, but to good thing is that we had the vet in and are trying to address the issues. We can't have dogs adopted out and then die in someone's home. I was so sad, but I was happy Valentin was loved as an individual dog in the days he was with us here, and I did manage to love up China and give her a name. I am learning that saving them all is near impossible.

China and I. 
I ran over a dog. Well, actually, while I was turning around outside the refuge and it was pouring rain, a dog ran under the car and I did not notice, and Carlos was in the car (he usually watched to make sure there were no dogs under my car). I was heartbroken, and we went back on Tuesday with the vet and he went to the vet to get xrays. I have to go today and follow up and see what happened in the end. My heart is too raw, I cried the whole time I held him while the vet examined him and determined he was coming to her office. We used a strap as a make-shift muzzle and his yelp of pain when we moved him shattered my heart. But it also made me mad and determined. We need to get all the dogs inside and partitioned off for their safety, and we started that last week. That way we can also have people go in and adopt safely and not have dogs jumping all over them, and I can drive bags of dog food in and not be worried about running over dogs. Our plan is to also have an "intake" area for when people dump off dogs in the middle of the night, because people do that.

Carlos mixes cement as the Tia supervises.

Posts were put in by Don Feliciano, and we are putting in a cement base along the bottom to try to prevent the dogs from digging under the fence. Try.

The Refuge, with the beginning of a new division.
Work never ends, but sometimes my funds and my energy do. I spend money I shouldn't helping, buying, building. I spend gas money to get there and back. I spend time there when I should be working on 100 other things. We are a small group of people with help from the Municipality for food and water, but we are far from a place where we can just "go to clean", though we need that, too. However, a few folks have offered to help, and I now feel like I am in a place to engage that help. Many freinds have helped with money and I hope they will still find some room in their budgets to do that.

In my head, I have plans. So I am taking another page from Trina's advice book and I am going to write them down.

Friday, September 7, 2018

Running with Rex

Around the end of May I met a dog who was potentially interested in running with me. I had been looking for a canine running buddy for a while. Someone to motivate me to get out of bed in the mornings,who was depending on me to get my butt into running pants and get a collar on and hit the pavement.
The issue, of course, is that canine running buddies don't post on Facebook, but thankfully for me, their less furry Moms do! And so, I have, since May, had a running buddy. Yeah!

The other day while starting out on my run, Rex, my canine running buddy, stopped dead in his tracks. To poop. That got me thinking - what advise would Rex give us runners? I read Runners World blogs and articles all the time - eat this, drink that, buy these shoes... You know the ones I am talking about, those articles that flip over in your brain as you start out before dawn (6 ways to make sure you are seen...).

Here is what I think Rex's advice would be:

  1. Poop when you need to. Have someone carry a bag for you if you are going to run in "one of those" places, but just poop when you need to.
  2. Pee when you need to. Although awkward sometimes in the middle of the street, just be quick about it. Everyone get it. Everyone pees.
  3. Integrate cross training into your run by including side lunges at passing bikes, sideways running while looking at roof dogs (if you live in one of those cities) and full force sprinting if there is a cat that crosses your path.
  4. Run as much and as often as you can. 
  5. Mix up the pace. Some days, start out of the gate like you have never been outside EVER, and other times, jump around a bit in the middle of your run to not get bored. 
  6. ALWAYS sprint the last two blocks home.
  7. Eat if you can while running. Look around the bases of garbage cans for enjoyable and nourishing nosh while out.
  8. Sticking your tongue out will help you run better. Trust me on this one.
  9. If you run into fellow running dogs, YELL at them from across the road. Something like: HEY! I AM HERE! I SEE YOU!
  10. Last but not least, beware of chihuahuas. They cannot ever be trusted.