Holy. Crap. It has been an absolutely INSANE four days. I’m completely exhausted and happy and frustrated and I feel like my life is going in a totally different direction.
I’m spending two weeks—probably more, actually, and probably will come back at some point when I’m done—at an animal shelter. It’s insane here. There are like 400 dogs and 100 cats or something nuts like that. There is a 70-year-old woman that runs the place, and her husband helps with the cats, and 5 Guatemalan employees who feed and walk the dogs. Once in a while there will be a volunteer who comes and helps out.
I will try to start from the beginning, but it’s tough four days in. So, I had to take two chicken buses from Antigua to get here. I was a bit nervous about them—they are literally converted school buses, full of locals, and the stops are confusing. Like, they’re not labeled or anything. I was lucky and people were nice to me (as most Guatemalans are) and told me when I should get off. Since I was sitting in the very last seat of the bus, I had to jump out the back door with my backpack on and hurt my knee a bit—but it’s feeling WAY better now.
I found my next chicken bus, and I had to tell the driver to stop at km 40 on the road. I kept my maps.me app open, which was good, because he did NOT stop for me, and I had to like run to the front being like “espera por favor!” so I could leave. Then I had to walk up a big-ass hill for like a year to this gate, and then up another big-ass hill to ANOTHER gate, and finally I was there. I had to wait a bit to get let in, but once I was…I pretty much got thrown right in.
There is no on-site veterinarian. Apparently, there hasn’t been for the past year. They used to have veterinarians from the university come and help out for free, but the stupid Guatemalan government passed a law that they need to be getting paid an absurd amount of money to do that. And this is a shelter. There is no money. So there is no veterinarian.
At this point, there was one other volunteer here, who has a lot of experience working at other shelters and as a vet assistant and stuff. She wants to be a veterinarian, and pretty much took the place of a resident vet, even though she’s never been to vet school. She just has the most experience. She told me she would teach me what she knows, because all I want to do is help animals, and she’s the same. It’s crazy—there is so much pressure on her, even though she is technically just a volunteer, because she’s diagnosing stuff and administering all kinds of medication and everything. The good thing for me is that I get to help her with all of this, and I’m getting a lot of practice getting dogs to do things they don’t want to do.
Anyway, so for the past year, things have been falling apart, and they are so understaffed, and there isn’t like even really a volunteer “program” anymore—you kind of just have to figure out what needs doing and just do it. I walked a lot of dogs that first day, and the main area that needs help is the clinic. Most of the dogs in the rest of the shelter are in packs in big cage things—a lot of them seem pretty happy, because they are outside and social and have places to run. But the ones in the clinic are in tiny cages and are mostly so sad. I have my favorites now, and I just want to take them all home and love them.
Another example of how things are falling apart—the volunteer living situation. It’s BAD. There are termites in the walls and rats in the storage and no sheets and I don’t have a pillow and the fridge needs a big rope thing to make it stay closed and the bathroom smells like mold and it’s just really REALLY bad. But there are two cats that live here and the other volunteer brought three (now five!) puppies here because they were going to die if she left them overnight in the clinic, and now poo and pee all over the floor is part of daily life and there are so many puppies and we are helping them and it makes it all worth it.
My second day, there was a spay/neuter clinic for the public. I was wearing scrubs (that I borrowed from the other volunteer because my clothes were getting DESTROYED) and people therefore treated me like an authority figure which was hilarious because I had no idea what I was doing. Anyway, there were basically two vets, and me and the other volunteer, and we had to do 28 surgeries. And the coolest thing was I GOT TO HELP. I mean I didn’t cut into a dog or anything, but I shaved SO many balls and I held some of their legs open for the vets and helped with the gas when the shot to knock them out wasn’t enough and got them stuff they needed and tried to anticipate their needs and learned to give shots to dogs and all kinds of stuff. It was AWESOME. Absolutely one of the highlights of the past like, ten years of my life. It just made me want to learn more and understand more and be able to actually just KNOW what to do when I see an animal in need, not just wish I did. So maybe vet school is a possibility in the future. I mean, I don’t know, but I want to open shelters and spay/neuter clinics anyway, and that would actually make me so much better at it.
The next day, another volunteer came! Woohoo!! AND he has vet experience as well. So the two of them are double teaming this place, and I’m learning as much as I can. We are trying to figure out what REALLY needs to be done, and what we really need. Resources here are tight—not only money, but literally stuff that’s so easy to get in the US is like impossible to get here. So much—even when it comes to like, the spay/neutering that we did the other day—is improvised, because we don’t have what we should. Things are never NEARLY as sanitary as they need to be, so the dogs get sick over and over again. What we really need is MONEY—money to hire people to build things we need, basically. To pay people with skills for their time.
We are also trying to work on building more of an online presence, as well as organize a database of all the animals. I have to just start posting a million pictures of animals and hope that one of them gets adopted. It’s just hard when there is SO much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. But that’s the plan.
I’m in love with one of our little puppies here, who sleeps curled up with me in my bed because she’s so skinny and gets so cold. Also a few of the clinic dogs—one who looks like a baby husky but she’s actually like five, and she HATES other dogs but loves people SO much, and another one who is just SO sweet and knows her name and jumps on you when you say it, and then one that just came in today. She was hit by a car and the firefighters brought her in. She can’t really feel much in her back half or move it much, and she probably has spinal damage. But she’s the first dog I got to name (“Lemony,” after Lemony Snicket) and I’ll be really sad if she doesn’t make it. She’s going to the vet tomorrow, and I feel like there’s a good chance she’ll be put down—she’s obviously in tons of pain. We gave her painkillers and something to help with the swelling, but who the fuck knows.
I love animals more than actually anything. And the great thing about being an adult is I no longer have people telling me not to touch them because they are dirty, or they might bite or scratch me, or anything like that. Which is exactly what you need in this line of work. There have already been two instances of dogs attacking the dogs I was walking. The first was when I was bringing a dog up to the front to get adopted, not realizing that there were dogs running free (they let certain ones out on the property at certain times of the day) and they tried to eat her. The second was yesterday? Today? I can’t keep my days straight anymore. I was walking three puppies and a couple of dogs escaped their enclosures when people were entering them. And they RAN for my puppies and tried to eat them. They were big puppies, and I couldn’t just pick all three up like I had with the dog the other time. One escaped, one was okay, but one got JUMPED by a dog and it was so scary. I threw myself on top of him trying to save him, and I THREW myself on them and one of the workers helped me get him off of him, and everyone was okay, but it was so scary. So yeah. If I hadn’t like done everything I could to save that dog, I don’t know if he would be alive right now.
There is so much more (cats, horses, more dog stories) but I’m completely drained and all I can think about is sleeping so I’m gonna do that. You can imagine the rest, probably. Constant barking, zero resources, adorable puppies. My life is so amazing.