28th Birthday With My Home-Dogs

It’s interesting how the act of celebrating my birthday has changed over the last ten years. As a teenager, my birthday consisted of attending the Dublin Irish Festival to watch Flogging Molly perform, my favorite band.  Then throughout and after college my birthdays were celebrated with good friends and family, either on or off the bike, sometimes both, and always with a phone call from my grandparents and the rest of my family to sing me “Happy Birthday.”

This year was different. There was no Flogging Molly mosh pit; I did however make sure to have them on the workout playlist I used for my 5:00am 30-minute jump rope workout.  There was no alcohol for the first time in several years. There was a bike ride, but it was a two-mile commute. There weren’t any of my best friends or my family from the states to join in the celebration, but I did get phone calls from loved ones and did spend an hour with my Swazi family in the evening.

I’m quite content with it being different this year. Even though it was Saturday I was technically working. My birthday was spent being around dogs literally all day! I worked at an animal spay day in my community. It was wonderful.  Many of my PCV friends here in Swaziland gave me grief for not coming out to celebrate birthdays this weekend. When I told them I was spending the day with dogs they knew they didn’t stand a chance of getting me away from my community. They have jokingly (kind of) acknowledged I would rather spend time with dogs over humans any day.

The Spay Day was an event put on by the local NGO Vusomnotfo, the nearby organization I have been working closely with for various projects and Swaziland Animal Welfare Society (SAWS)… they really need to consider changing of their organization name as the acronym doesn’t elicit warm fuzzy feelings I want for an animal welfare organization. Each year, Vusomnotfo and SAWS tries to put on this event, this was the 3^rd year for the event. Speculating, I am pretty certain the fact the location for the event was my community might have something to do with the fact that I work closely with Vusomnotfo and have taken my Babe to SAWS to adopt one dog and have taken another dog there to get spayed.

Vets from all over Swaziland and even from other southern Africa countries came to assist in the event.  Over the course of the day, I would estimate that over 100 dogs from my community received vaccinations and/or were spayed or neutered. Everything done at no cost to the pet owners.

It was great to see so many people from my community take responsibility and ownership for their dogs, something that is by no means the status quo in rural Swaziland.  These dogs are going to live longer and healthier lives and prevent thousands of cases of dogs being neglected/unwanted/abused.

On my bike ride in the morning, commuting to the school where the spay day was being held, I passed so many people heading the same direction with their dogs along the road. Grade-school children carrying their dog in their arms over 2 miles. I tried to take the dog of a community gogo (grandmother/old lady) in my messenger bag but the dog was too big.

Throughout the day, I spent a lot of time welcoming my community members to the event as they waited to enter the school premises. As I knew the people and have built relationships with many people there, I was tasked with taking as well. I also was taking the pictures because…well…I don’t need a reason when there are puppies.

Much of the day I was also in one of the classrooms that was converted into the recovery room, where dozens of dogs were recovering and waking up from the anesthesia before being release to go back to their owner.  I went in to see the operation room momentarily but quickly remembered why I could never go into the medical field and promptly left.

 

 

At the end of the event, there were a lot of left-overs, so I took sandwiches back home to my family. There was no cake this year and that was just fine. I forgot to tell my Swazi family about it being my birthday until that evening. They sang Happy Birthday to me, both in English and siSwati. I blew out the “2” and the “8” candles my parents from home sent me, they were nestled on top of the sandwiches I took from the spay day left-overs.