Cinderella and Coca

It was a promise made long ago. Well, not a promise exactly, an understanding. It was around a supper table in our home one night in St. Catharines when Wanda and I were talking about what moving would mean to our family (going to Ethiopia, etc.). It seems all that the girls wanted to know was if they would be able to have pets at the new place. Knowing that there was a compound and that the current family had pets it seemed safe to say, ‘ok’ to their hopes. From then on we didn’t have so hard a time talking about moving. The idea of having a pet made all the difference to Amani, Abby and Sophia.

Coca was already here when we arrived, thanks to the Yoder family. Sophia laid claim to ‘ownership’ and so even though everyone plays with Coca, he is Sophia’s dog (that claim is tenuous since Coca shows much more loyalty to the men who are the guardians of the compound. Coca comes whenever they call). Sophia has taken to giving Coca the table scraps and bread which helped developed Coca’s loyalty to her. Sophia has also hugged and played with Coca from the first day so that helped as well. Coca, however, wasn’t so sure about me. It took several weeks before Coca stopped growling and barking at me. He doesn’t bark at me anymore even though I see him early in the morning, guess he has decided that I must belong to this family afterall.

Cinderella was added to our ‘family’ only the other week. Cinderella is a rabbit and is Abby’s pet. We were told that rabbits are usually sold at the International Evangelical Church bazaar, which is held monthly. Sure enough, 4 baby bunnies were in a basket huddled together. Abby wouldn’t leave the basket even though we wanted to see the rest of the bazaar. Where would we keep it? But that wasn’t important to Abby, what was important was that we would buy a rabbit. So we agreed, took it home in a large shoebox, and tried to figure out what to do next. I remembered a family in the S.I.M. compound with rabbits. I thought maybe I could see if they could help. Pat and Anita (Canadians by the way!) offered to let us borrow an older rabbit hutch and we were in business. So while we are having new rabbit hutches built for us we are borrowing this old one.

And we aren’t done. Amani knows that if we find a suitable kitten she will get a kitten. And even tho Sophia has a dog, we may say yes to a puppy for her. The girls love their animals and that is good. We see many animals that are out on the street, straggly and looking for food. Dogs and cats. There are simply too many and people can’t afford to take care of them. Dogs are used as guard dogs in compounds.
We’ll keep the numbers stopped at one new animal each. But it will be quite an active compound in the future.