Awful Stuff

So I'm not going to blame it on being a second year volunteer that has had to do two first years but at the same time I AM. It sucks. I mean, you've really gotta have some stones to do evac with transfer. You REALLY do. It's no joke.

So anyway. I mean yeah I've been having problems trying to adjust here. Trying to do my second first year faster than my first first year so that I can actually get stuff done. In a village whose language I don't speak so most of what I do is...nevermind. That's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is that I killed a dog. It wasn't me, really, but I was in the car. I was on my way back to site to do the geophysical study for the pump I want to put in at the school (which is actually going to happen tomorrow, inshallah). We were going through Kati. A ways down the road, I saw a dog and I passively thought, hope that dog gets out of the road! Dogs should never be in the road because they'll get squished. People here aren't exactly careful drivers. But it was so far ahead of us that I didn't really give it a second thought.

A few moments later, I saw a moto coming up next to us going the other way and our car swerved a bit towards it to avoid a bashee on the right and then I felt our car make a break. And then a bump. For a fleeting moment I thought it was a speed bump. But then I heard this awful screaming under my feet and then another bump on the back driver's side tire. I stopped breathing.

I told myself not to, but I looked back. What I saw was a dog on it's side in the middle of the road, it's legs jerking in the air, spasming like it was having a seizure. We had run it over with both our front and back tires. I immediately looked back in front of us. Neither of the people in the front made any kind of reaction. I dug my fingers into the heel of my hand willing myself not to look back again. And I didn't.

But now I desperately want to know if the dog DIED. I mean...it's one thing to hit an animal and it's another to let it torment to death rather than just kill it. SLIT IT'S THROAT...that's how they kill feed animals, so why not roadkill?

In my fantasy someone who was there on the side of the road went out there and put the poor thing out of its misery. But I don't know if that's true.

In Guinea I was in a taxi and saw a moto hit a cow. It threw the moto and the guy driving it across the asphalt. But the cow laid there in the road, on it's side, mooing weakly. Our taxi stopped to help. The guy was ok. His moto was scratched up. Two other cows came out onto the road and bent their heads down to the wounded cow and mooed at it. It mooed back. They walked away.

The guy who had hit it with the moto borrowed a knife from someone in the taxi and went out and slit the poor thing's throat. I was in the taxi the whole time. I was trying not to look. I was trying to concentrate on breathing. But it was a RELIEF that the cow was put out of it's misery so quickly.

I don't know what happened to the dog. When I drove back on the same route the next day he wasn't in the road and I didn't see him on the side of the road, but he could have been dragged off anywhere. I just can't stand the idea of a defenseless animal suffering. If it's going to die, kill it quick, don't leave it there whimpering.

Do not make the mistake of thinking this kind of thing is rare. The other day my host brother brought a sheep back on the back of a bicycle saying it had been killed by a car in the road. They gutted it and everyone had mutton for dinner. I do not know how long it suffered.

Another time I was in the Peace Corps bus and we found a sheep on the side of the road who looked like it had fallen off the top of a bashee. One of it's eyes were hanging out and it could not stand up. They put it on the top of the bus where it flailed around with every turn and bump for hours until I finally got out of the bus. Later on, people ate it for dinner at Tubaniso. I was not among them.

These are not all the stories I have witnessed.

In the end it is just the cycle of life. I just wish it didn't have to include such suffering. But like much else here...there is nothing you can do. Unless you're willing to insist the vehicle you are in stop. And take that knife in your hand yourself.

I can't do it...can you?