Blog Post #10 For the Feline lovers out there...
Blog #10
For the Feline lovers out there...
April 26, 2018
Gentle Reader,
If you are a cat or dog lover, Lesvos is the place to be!
Some kind souls leaves cat foot out for these strays every day.
Yes, cats are everywhere here.
At Kara Tepe, there tends to be many dogs. All are strays who wander their way over to the camp. They tend to hang out in and around the Movement on the Ground office, where caring folks leave them water and food. It's turned extremely hot here in the last several days, so the animals are mostly looking for shady areas, which are few and far between.
Many volunteers have adopted one or more of these dogs. Pauline, the coach for the Barcelona Football Program, is especially generous when it comes to the dogs at camp. Kelly, from the Netherlands, just made special arrangements to take Penelope home to Holland with her today.
I won't be bringing animals home with me, but it is heart warming to see loving kindness extended to feline and canine friends here at Kara Tepe... and beyond.
So, for today, I will end this blog post with some thoughts on animals and animal lovers...
I am thinking especially of two of my cats: Katrinka, a lovely Blue Russian who was my first friend when I taught in Taft, California in 1982; Stella, my most recent cat buddy who died almost a year ago now.
Katrinka hung around the Taft High School Campus. I arrived two weeks early to set up my classroom and apartment, and Katrinka and I became fast friends. I left food for her everyday, near my classroom. I was quickly reprimanded by the principal who asked me not to feed the strays. He wanted them off the campus, I suppose understandably. However, teaching has always been a subversive activity for me, so I began to feed Katrinka underneath my teacher desk. She would meet me at my Chevy Nova in the morning, trotting along with me to my classroom. When students entered, she would pounce out the window, returning during my prep period, lunch, and after school.
Sadly, she did not greet me one day when I arrived in my little red car. This was right before Winter Break. I placed an ad in the local paper, asking if anyone had seen her. Within two days, I received a phone call from a woman down from the high school who thought she might have Katrinka.
So, I went to visit on my lunch period, and the woman told me she was in the back room. These were the days of shag carpeting, and when I called Katrinka, she emerged from beneath the bed. However, she was placing her front paws deep in the shag carpet, and then pulled herself forward. It seems she could not longer walk. The kind woman, who had taken her to the vet, told me she had internal bleeding and that her pelvis was crushed. Apparently, the local guy down the road (who was being prosecuted for animal cruelty) gets drunk on weekend nights, finds local strays, bashes them around, and then tosses them out his window onto the street.
I could not go near that man, as I would have harmed him profusely and ended up in jail for assault. Instead, I asked my landlord, who was also my superintendent, if I could nurse Katrinka at the condo I was renting from him. He kindly agreed.
Katrinka spent days buried beneath the comforter on my bed, shaking with dread from the ordeal she had been through. She eventually came out more and more, and by the end of the school year, she accompanied me back to Michigan. My roommate, Karen, who lived in St Louis, was going home for the summer, so we trekked across the country together. We found hotels that accepted cats, but Katrinka proceeded to meow profusely, smelling the other animals that had stayed in the room in the past, we figured. Anyway, long story short, Karen couldn't sleep with all the meowing, and neither could I , so I ended up sleeping in the care with Katrinka for three nights. There, she peacefully cuddled up on my chest and went to sleep for the night. Uncomfortable way to travel across the country, but sometimes you just do what you have to do...
Katrinka ended up learning to climb trees and run all over country property in Michigan. When I would pet her, running my hand down her spine, I could feel the jig jaggy damage to her spine from her time in California. But she was a loving, active cat... and lived to be 21 years old!!!
For the Feline lovers out there...
April 26, 2018
Gentle Reader,
If you are a cat or dog lover, Lesvos is the place to be!
Some kind souls leaves cat foot out for these strays every day.
Yes, cats are everywhere here.
At Kara Tepe, there tends to be many dogs. All are strays who wander their way over to the camp. They tend to hang out in and around the Movement on the Ground office, where caring folks leave them water and food. It's turned extremely hot here in the last several days, so the animals are mostly looking for shady areas, which are few and far between.
Many volunteers have adopted one or more of these dogs. Pauline, the coach for the Barcelona Football Program, is especially generous when it comes to the dogs at camp. Kelly, from the Netherlands, just made special arrangements to take Penelope home to Holland with her today.
I won't be bringing animals home with me, but it is heart warming to see loving kindness extended to feline and canine friends here at Kara Tepe... and beyond.
So, for today, I will end this blog post with some thoughts on animals and animal lovers...
I am thinking especially of two of my cats: Katrinka, a lovely Blue Russian who was my first friend when I taught in Taft, California in 1982; Stella, my most recent cat buddy who died almost a year ago now.
Katrinka hung around the Taft High School Campus. I arrived two weeks early to set up my classroom and apartment, and Katrinka and I became fast friends. I left food for her everyday, near my classroom. I was quickly reprimanded by the principal who asked me not to feed the strays. He wanted them off the campus, I suppose understandably. However, teaching has always been a subversive activity for me, so I began to feed Katrinka underneath my teacher desk. She would meet me at my Chevy Nova in the morning, trotting along with me to my classroom. When students entered, she would pounce out the window, returning during my prep period, lunch, and after school.
Sadly, she did not greet me one day when I arrived in my little red car. This was right before Winter Break. I placed an ad in the local paper, asking if anyone had seen her. Within two days, I received a phone call from a woman down from the high school who thought she might have Katrinka.
So, I went to visit on my lunch period, and the woman told me she was in the back room. These were the days of shag carpeting, and when I called Katrinka, she emerged from beneath the bed. However, she was placing her front paws deep in the shag carpet, and then pulled herself forward. It seems she could not longer walk. The kind woman, who had taken her to the vet, told me she had internal bleeding and that her pelvis was crushed. Apparently, the local guy down the road (who was being prosecuted for animal cruelty) gets drunk on weekend nights, finds local strays, bashes them around, and then tosses them out his window onto the street.
I could not go near that man, as I would have harmed him profusely and ended up in jail for assault. Instead, I asked my landlord, who was also my superintendent, if I could nurse Katrinka at the condo I was renting from him. He kindly agreed.
Katrinka spent days buried beneath the comforter on my bed, shaking with dread from the ordeal she had been through. She eventually came out more and more, and by the end of the school year, she accompanied me back to Michigan. My roommate, Karen, who lived in St Louis, was going home for the summer, so we trekked across the country together. We found hotels that accepted cats, but Katrinka proceeded to meow profusely, smelling the other animals that had stayed in the room in the past, we figured. Anyway, long story short, Karen couldn't sleep with all the meowing, and neither could I , so I ended up sleeping in the care with Katrinka for three nights. There, she peacefully cuddled up on my chest and went to sleep for the night. Uncomfortable way to travel across the country, but sometimes you just do what you have to do...
Katrinka ended up learning to climb trees and run all over country property in Michigan. When I would pet her, running my hand down her spine, I could feel the jig jaggy damage to her spine from her time in California. But she was a loving, active cat... and lived to be 21 years old!!!
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
“
Animal lovers are a special breed of humans, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to sentimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky.
“
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
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