Village Hopping

     First I need to throw in a picture of Chitti on my last day at the shelter. The dogs and cows had no clue that we were leaving, but she certainly seemed to. Aside from her sad face, she was unusually gentle and calm with me, just wanting to sit with me. When I walked away, she grasped onto my finger and with her little hand and held on tight, but luckily didn't follow me out of the monkey area.

     Anyway, we checked out of the hotel Sunday night and loaded the car until it was about to burst. Liters upon liters of water, probably far more than we would need, and more than enough food and snacks to last us four nights. Most of the road to Kindness Farm is at least semi-paved, but parts of it are not and involve a lot of swerving from one side of the road to the other to avoid the holes. I’ve gotten used to traffic moving on the wrong side of the road – hopefully I don’t accidentally do the same when I get back home. I am still a bit shocked when on a larger road that has a barrier between the two directions, cars drive on the wrong side of the divide to make a turn easier or to avoid traffic or for whatever other unknown reason. It certainly doesn’t seem to make the other people on the road think twice, it’s such a normal occurrence. 

         After lot of bumps and turns, we pulled up outside what was to be our new home. The room has a cement floor, a few chairs and benches, a fridge, and a mattress on the group. We went about setting up the little room, kitchen area in one corner, suitcases in another, filling it with so much more than I am used to for living out in the middle of nowhere when I usually just have my backpacking pack. The biggest difference between this and most backpacking was quite a bit one – the heat. 

         It was fairly cool in the evening, and we went for a stroll around the shelter grounds, visiting the water buffalo and cattle, watching the sun set into the fluffy clouds. It was really nice to be able to actually walk around in the evening, as usually we are back at the hotel hiding in the air conditioned room and in an area of the city that isn’t particularly safe or desirable to walk around at night. Here, the honking and loud music were replaced by the chatter of the bugs, birds, frogs, and cows. In place of diesel was the sweet smell of the cows, which is actually quite pleasant, as they eat hay and grass rather than corn like most cows back home. The view outside of our room was no longer the swimming pool (which certainly did provide us entertainment) but a sky full of bright stars in the absence of light pollution. 

        We sat out in front of the room for a while until the bugs began to attack, so hiding in the room it was. But the sound of the frogs was much closer than any body of water than we knew of. When we opened the door to the room, two frogs happily bounded around. It was quite the chase but we eventually we were able to send them out and on their way and close the doors and windows. That’s when the room got extremely hot and in combination with the little black bugs sneaking in through cracks in the door and crawling all over the floor and our mattress, it wasn’t the most pleasant night. I did have an amusing morning event when half-awake at 5am, I noticed something on my leg and a moment later saw a cute little frog hopping across the room. It was eventually decided that we would head back to the hotel and do the long commute each day. We’ll leave the hotel at 5am, start work at 6:30 or so, and work until we get too tired. The original plan was to work in the afternoon after a break, but we tried that the first day and the dogs were all hidden away by then, so long mornings make more sense. 

      There’s been a bunch of traffic around Vizag lately because of an upcoming election. One political party has been doing massive publicity and the candidate was in town, we crawled along for part of the journey home yesterday. There are countless posters in the city and spreading into the rural areas of the main candidate dressed in different saris and posed in various positions. Balloons in the sky with their pictures and logos, and little flags hung up all over. There are calves and horses walking the streets adorned in colorful jewelry and attire. Apparently the candidates use the tactic of paying the villagers in a little bit of food and money to come out to their rallies and walk in their parades, so there were hoards of people walking the streets, waving political flags with the candidates’ photos on them. Some were dressed in shirts and hats printed with these photos, and others sat in cars projecting large billboards. It’s odd to me that it’s just one candidate and her party being represented with no counter signs anywhere to be seen, but she must have significantly more money than her opponents. There are such better things that she could be spending her money on, but such is the corruption here. 

       We are driving both out to the villages and around the area in an animal ambulance. The big vehicle actually helps with the bumpiness of the roads and although there is no AC, there is usually a nice breeze as long as we are moving. The driver/catcher takes great enjoyment out of using the siren, both to announce our presence when we get to the villages and to get cars to move aside when we are driving along. In Hyderabad and the busier parts of Vizag, people usually ignore the sirens of ambulances entirely, so I was quite surprised that the cars and autos often move over to let us pass. We have absolutely no emergency, of course, but he has a great time using them – thankfully, they are a lot quieter and less obnoxious than those in the US. When we get to villages, they sometimes use the announcer to let people know why we are there, but it doesn’t spread far enough so a lot of talking (all in Telugu) has to be done as we are walking around catching the dogs. One of the helpers who comes with us usually says ‘hello, hello, hello’ quite a few times on the loudspeaker before he actually starts saying anything of content; it’s quite amusing. As we drive between villages, the driver speeds along the winding roads blasting Telugu music. We often have to cling to our seats or the frame of the open window in the bumpy front seat of the ambulance, but it’s a fun ride and the driver is reasonably safe. I’ve been surprised at how few accidents I’ve seen given the way that people drive here, but I guess they are all just so used to the craziness. 

        We’ve visited 9 villages and vaccinated 101 dogs in the past two days, with anywhere from 2 to 21 dogs per village. The dog-catching part is often very challenging and takes quite a while, as many of the dogs are not very social and incredibly smart, keeping to open spaces (fields or canals) or jumping off the tops of roofs. In our first village, it took us nearly three hours to vaccinate 18 dogs. After that, we decided that we would just circle each village once and catch the dogs we were able to and then move on down the road.

       In one village, we had a collection of kids running alongside us as we navigated the town, some of them helpfully telling us where the dogs might be hiding out. At one point, I was surrounded by a huge crowd of kids when one of our catchers caught a dog and all the kids shouted out (referring to me as Auntie, as many do here) to let me know and ran alongside me as I made my way over to give the injection. In such a rural area, they all had a huge fascination with me. I didn’t get the kind of blank or confused stares that I often get in the city; everyone in the village was extremely friendly but also very curious to have a white-skinned foreigner in their midst.  

                                       

Some of them chattered away at me in Telugu, but I was of course unable to converse with them – I keep accidentally thinking of things to say to them in Spanish, but that wouldn’t be all that effective. The only question I was able to easily answer (as well as ask) was my name, which soon all of the village kids seemed to know and kept repeating amongst themselves. I was also asked what village I was from, and since I had already told them I was from the US and had no idea how to tell them I didn’t live in a village, I responded California.  In another village, the kids were very curious about me but quite shy. When I took out my camera, however, they all opened up immediately and bounced around happily as I took pictures of them, giggling away when they looked at the images of themselves on my screen. 

      As we wander the dusty streets and alleys, cross over the creeks, climb up onto the roofs, and pass through the houses in pursuit of the dogs, it’s really interesting to see the differences between the villages and take in their ways of life. Early in the mornings, everyone is out and about with their typical routines - bathing and brushing their teeth by the water spouts; girls sitting on the stoops in front of the houses as their moms brush and braid their hair before looping it up with a black bow; women stirring pots of food and tea over a clay or cement stove with an open flame. As the day goes on, some people sit with their piles of vegetables for sale, some scrub at their laundry on smooth slabs of cement, and many of the older members of the community sit in the shade and chat. In one village, women sat weaving big umbrellas from plants for people to carry when they go out to work in the fields. A common sight is that of people walking around with large pots on their heads full of water or grain, expertly making their way through the fields or around the village. Regardless of how many times I’ve seen this around the world, it never fails to impress me. 

     Some of the villages are made up of mostly houses, others of huts, and most of some combination of the two. The houses are mostly open with no windows and either no doors or a curtain or gate. Most have cement stoops in front upon which people sit to work or rest. There are dirt paths in between the rows of houses, and sometimes narrow alleyways in between – these are often useful for catching the dogs with one catcher on either side.  There are rows of chicken houses on the outskirts of many of the villages, used for eggs and meat. Mother hens and their tiny chicks also wander the streets, sitting in the shade near the houses. Water buffalo, cattle, and goats are often harnessed on ropes in front of the huts. Vaccinating any of these creatures would have been easy enough, but most of the dogs have free roam and put up quite the chase, aside from the few (usually Pomeranians) who have owners and are brought directly to us, carried or by leash. I often mistakenly find a goat (or once even a chicken, or a piece of clothing in a dark corner) and excitedly think that it’s a dog. 

      We’ve had many different reactions to our presence in the village. To those who did not hear our announcements, it’s often scary to see a group of people walking around with nets and syringes. I once had a man run towards me as I was pulling up the injection, completely panicked that I was going to kill the dog I was about to vaccinate. Many of the villagers have wanted us to kill the dogs, as they are of no economic value and often kill the chicks; one village went so far as to offer to pay us to do the job (to cancel this out, another village offered to pay us to vaccinate the dogs, which of course we declined). I wish we could have something to make the dogs more welcome in their community, but aside from reinforcing the chicken coops, I’m not sure what could be done. Some of the villages have had very few dogs, apparently because they do sometimes have people come around to get rid of the dogs.  A few of the people who own dogs don’t let us vaccinate, many of them afraid of Western medicine, but the majority of the dogs roam freely and don’t belong to anyone, so we are able to vaccinate them as we please. It’s frustrating because these owned dogs would be so easy to vaccinate, but the owners are not receptive to even the explanations of their fellow villagers and get extremely angry at us, so those are a lost cause. 

      Others have been very pleased with what we are doing, helping us quite a bit. We often have someone who takes us around to the places where the dogs like to hide. In one village today, the schoolteacher actually dismissed the kids for an hour break and came along with us, showing us where to go and talking to the people for us. They were much more receptive to what we were doing when they heard it from a respected community member, and we were hugely successful in our vaccination efforts in this village. When we finished, he bought us all cold drinks (despite our refusal) as we sat in the shade to cool down. He called the schoolteacher at a neighboring village to have him be our guide there, but unfortunately we ended up on the wrong road and went to a few other villages instead. In another village, a woman offered us lunch before we left, which we declined – I doubt we could manage the spiciness. 

      In every village, we have a parade of curious people trailing after us. Packs of children in the mornings before school and later on, various men and women watch our show. Some of them laugh hysterically when we catch a dog and seem to be enjoying themselves thoroughly. Others are a bit shocked (but still fascinated) while watching the process, which isn’t the most pleasant thing to see. 

      This afternoon when we finished our vaccinations for the day, we returned to a hut we had visited the day before where a villager was taking care of a dog who had been hit by a car.  She had a broken leg that we could do nothing about, but hopefully she’ll be able to heal up on her own. Cleaned up her wounds and gave her some antibiotics and pain meds. Dogs here are pretty tough, so with the owner’s help, hopefully she’ll improve. Most of the dogs here are actually is pretty good shape, fairly well-fed and without any obvious problems. Since we aren’t able to handle the majority of them, we can’t do exams or anything besides the rabies injection, but I’m very glad to see that most are in good health. 

       After we finished with our little patient, we walked over to the canal and waded in a bit. The day was much cooler today, but it still felt nice to walk into the water. It had been drizzling on and off with thunder in the distance for the previous few hours, and started up again as we stood in the canal. It was very serene there with the raindrops falling on the water, the goat kids prancing around on the banks of the canal, and the occasional worker walking into the water to fill up a bucket. Our driver, who had his head peed on earlier by a panicked dog with good aim, jumped into the water in his clothes to wash his hair. It would have been nice to swim there, but with no change of clothes and a long journey home, that didn’t happen. 

      Two more days of working in the village before it’s time to leave Vizag and explore a few other areas of India. The goal is to vaccinate at least 200 dogs, and hope that people take in what we (well, not me) talk to them about and read the pamphlets. More cool  weather would be a plus as well, definitely makes it easier to walk for hours through the villages.