Finally, a nice story

We've over the last month and half have meet numerous people that I'm sure we'll both keep in contact with for many years to come. This is one of the great things about traveling is that you can meet a tremendous amount of different people from different countries that you have much in common with, as you have all had the Indian experience (the Kashmir experience further more for that matter). If I were to attempt to sell someone on why they should go to India, this certainly would be one of my major selling points: you'll meet people from every country, but you'll all share a similar experience that will never leave you.

This is all true, but we believe that in the last day we both had one of the more heart-filled experiences. Sasha and myself we were walking about from lunch to our hotel because it was raining like the devil was beating his mother. You must understand, we're in the most southern province of India and in summer that means only two things: super cheap hotels and monsoons. So we have the setting: it was raining hard. We figured that we'd just take it easy in our cozy colonial style town and play the same card game that we've played for the last six weeks, but as we walked down a street that had about 5inches of water on it we heard some strange noise. I saw a ton of birds up on a tree trying to get away from the rain and just figured it was them, but Sasha started to look into a grassy area because she is still able to follow sounds because she didn't destroy her hearing with an ipod. What did she find? A three week old kitten crying that we still have not determined the name of yet (the debate continues). We were not too sure how the cat got there. It could have been left there by a person or abandoned by its mother, but in such an unsafe area (close to the road that was in flooding with rain) we could easily assume that no one was coming back for it. Personally, my inclination was to leave it while Sasha right away picked it up with her scarf and into her arms. This is particularly ironic seeing that I'm veg and she is half Serbian... that speaks for itself.

The kitten that we had found could hardly walk a few inches without falling and looked like it was about to starve to death. We figured that we should get to a vet as soon as possible and get some information about young kittens. Neither of us, I should add, have ever owned or wanted a cat, and therefore didn't have a clue. Thus, we set out to find a rickshaw in the rain and get our new friend some help. Sadly, on Saturdays the vet closed early in the afternoon, so we'd be forced to wait till the next day till we could see a vet. Seeing that both of us were clueless about what to do, we asked the driver what kittens eat and he told us to get some milk, so we got some milk and got a box so we could smuggle our new friend into our room. The major worry was that we wouldn't be able to get her inside because she had kept crying whenever she moved an inch away from Sasha, but thankfully she made no noises and we got passed our toothless (mind you, very friendly toothless) hostel owner.

We got our friend into the room and dried her off. Sasha told me to go down to the computer cafe and find some information about the diet of kittens, in which I soon found out that cow's milk could give kittens a serious case of the shits and lead to getting dehydrated, and under her weak condition most likely die. Just to make note of this, you should only give kittens goats milk if momma cat isn't around, but in the cruel faith that is our lives we were surrounded by goats but no way to milk them! I keep on writing milf instead of milk for some reason. I just did it again. Don't look up "milf" mom. Lucky for us, we found out that basically no cat will say no to tuna and we were sitting next to the sea, so tuna it was. Our friend ate that stuff up like there was no tomorrow and slept for the next 12 hours.

This morning we woke up early to get down to the vet and see what we could do for the cat's health and see about shelters or potential means of getting it a home. We both were not childish enough to think that this would be easy as you can walk down any street in India and see goats, cows, stray dogs and cats, and if you're lucky, maybe a 4 meter snake, so animal control isn't a pressing priority here. This of course meant we might have to put our friend down if we couldn't find her a home because she would die a much more painful death in no time on the streets. We had hope that maybe one of the individuals we have spoken to who were staying here for a prolong period would be interested, but there was no telling if they would.

So we got to the vet and waited for him to show up. In the meantime, our friend made friends with a cat hanging around the hospital that had a broken leg and according to one of the people working there was left there by someone a week ago. The vet showed up and we told him the story. He said that this cat was healthy in terms of diseases, but said the chances of finding a home were next to none. Apparently, in India it isn't very popular to have cats or any pets, and if you do it is dog most of the time. As a result, I brought up the issue of putting the cat down in a couple days if we couldn't find a potential owner, which lead Sasha to begin tearing up. Just as we begun to speak about it, a lady who lived next to the vet came in to see the doctor, and saw Sasha getting upset. The lady didn't speak any English but could see Sasha was very very sad and asked what was wrong. The doctor explained that we might have to put down the cat if we couldn't find an owner. She then simply said it was too early for the cat to die and said she would take her. We asked if the doctor knew this woman and he said yes and she was a good person too. We agreed to give her the cat and offered to pay for any needed shots or food, which she declined and the doctor said he'd do it for free. As a result, our friend now has a new home and hopefully a happy and loving owner.

The question remains: What should we name the cat? Sasha wanted to name it Pygmee for some unknown reason... She says that it would be a good name because the cat was so tiny, but I thought it sounded like some reject person... you don't need to rub it in the cat's face that its mother most likely didn't love it! I thought Dal was a nice name because that's what I eat everyday. The other name we came up with was Abbeycat for Humanity, which is a mixture of the lovely friend of ours Abbey and the Christian organization that gives people houses. The debate continues but tell us what you think we should name the cat? Look at the pictures on Facebook. Go Slovenia and Serbia tonight!