trying to be culturally relativistic even when it comes to slowly murdering cute puppies.
If you are a big fan of the beasts you may not want to read this.
There’s this guy I know who I will call Ti Terib. This isn’t his real name. He has a congenital defect that causes his arms to curl up into his body, but he was lucky enough to get surgery at a young age. While he can’t move anything heavy around or reach the glasses in the top of the cupboard, he can write and drive a motorcycle. He can also speak great english, due to the fact that he spent a bit of time in the US as a kid for the surgery. All in all, he’s quite fortunate given the cards that were dealt him. In Haiti, it’d normally be a lot worse.
He had an incident about a month ago. He didn’t cover his latrine, and a puppy fell down into the bottom of it. Instead of asking someone to help him get it out (he couldn’t, given his physical limitations) or killing it with a gun, he let it die slowly, in a pile of shit, over a period of five days. It was making all kinds of awful sounds, I am told. It makes me want to throw up and break what little arms he has. I really like dogs.
I told this story to my best friend, Pierre Renel. He is one of the sweetest and most gentle people I’ve ever met. When I finished, he started laughing really really hard. When I tried to talk about the dying puppy noises, thinking that would silence his laughter, he just chuckled even harder. Then he received a phone call, picked up, and explained that “David was just telling me a really great joke.” He looked at me and said, “This happens in Haiti, man. Did you forget about cholera already?”
So, what to take away from this? Every blan I know became fairly outraged when they heard what Ti Terib had done. Pierre Renel had said that the same thing had happened to him when he was 12 years old, living in the mountains of Leon. I saw a dead puppy today on the road while I was driving to work, and I have been thinking about it a bit today. I guess everyone has their own “I moved to a different country and was shocked to find out that they don’t take their dogs for walks or give them baths” kind of stories. This is mine.
Take good care of your dogs.
This is the moon rising over the ocean from Calas, a neighborhood up the hill that overlooks Jérémie.
