Welcome to adventure camp.
I’m always learning new things here. Today I learned why one family doesn’t name it’s dogs. I had brought home one dose of rabies vaccination on an ice pack for my dog. Upon arrival, I found my dog had mysteriously already received her vaccination while I was away. Surprise to me as she was the only dog in the village that was treated. So what to do with the extra? Search for a dog that needed it of course. An easy task.
Once the puppy was located, I was invited into the owner’s home. A large house made of bamboo and wood planks with a dirt floor, kids running around giggling, wrapped up in traditional sarongs. Despite my sweating profusely in the house, they all seemed cold. 3 puppies scampered around looking for cuddles while mama & papa kept guard over them from the large, white, scary foreigner.
After a close inspection of my vaccine bottles, the family declared; “Bali medicine is different from our medicine.” This was not news to me. Medicine in my small village consists of ginger, papaya leaves, and still-warm-from-the-fire-ash.
I asked if they’d named the puppies yet, entirely joking. In rural Indonesia, people eat dog as it is more livestock than friend. A harsh reality you have to get used to when living here.
Despite my taunting – it was lost in translation. I watched as this large man with red stained teeth & confusion in his eyes tried his best to come up with a reason to not name your dog, because ‘no’ wasn’t good enough. In the states, we accept; “Don’t name your food” & I thought he might be headed in that direction. I was wrong.
This man in particular has dogs for going into the jungle to hunt wild boar. In the jungle, there lives that snake with “the same pattern on our sarongs”……Yes, pythons. Big ones too.
So, if you give your dog a name, then go into the jungle and call out the dog’s name – the snake will hear a name being called out & know that some tasty snack is running around near by. The consequence, it will eat your dog assuming it’s a child or something equally delicious.
What I gathered from this is that it would then be wise to not bring your children into the jungle with you on any expedition, but I feel that point was missed by the storyteller who frequents the jungle with his 8 children. If you possess a name – you may very well be lunch. That does not bode well for me and my dog as we live alone on the edge of the jungle and both have names. But I’m hoping the python eats the 8 kids first and is too full to finish off me and my dog.
With the new knowledge in hand, Teni; my employee, & I brought the puppy back to my house to give it it’s shot. Looking back on this, were anyone to walk in on this scene – they might think we were participating in some sort of unfortunate ritual. By the dim light of solar Christmas lights and a flashlight in Teni’s mouth, we made a vaccine concoction while holding a sobbing puppy down on the dinner table. This is all so very backwards in the land of Manggarai – vaccines at all, vaccines for dogs, foreigners hanging out with locals in the dark….. with dogs. The list goes on.
Upon completion of the task we named the dog since it’s a gift for a friend that doesn’t happen to live in the jungle. It is white – like me, they pointed out – so we named it the Manggarai word for ‘coconut’; Nio. (Nee-oh).
Nio went home with a group of awesome people that came for the weekend to help with turtle conservation and English lessons in the village. You can follow up on that blog post on my Wicked Adventures blog page!