Dogs are cowards
Back in the States, I used to tutor Somali students, helped them with their high school homework, et cetera. Once I was editing a young girl's essay for a college scholarship. Her story was moving, and strange. It was about how she'd been seperated from her mother during the war. How soldiers had stormed into her home and shot her aunt along with newborn niece. How her mother had been at work and roadblocks kept her from returning. How she was taken by an uncle to a refugee camp in Kenya, went to school there, and suffered for two years. It was about how one day, she received word that she needed to find a telephone and stay there, that her mother would call that number. Her mother called and said that she was going to America. She would send for her daughter as soon as she could. Two months later, this young girl was on her way to New York City, and from there to Minneapolis.
At the begining of her story she wrote about life in Somalia. She said that she would try to avoid gangs and other thugs to and from school. She said she and her friends would sometimes encounter dogs on the roads home from school. She used the following phrase when explaining how they handled that situation, "We would see the dogs growl, then we would stone them." In my head I held the image of this gentle girl, and others like her, pelting a dog to death with stones. I asked, "you killed it?" "What? No, we throw stones and he runs away. Dogs are cowards."
There are a few dogs on the streets of Medan. I see them most often at night as I walk back from J.'s. I saw one, he had no interest in me, but I remembered this story. I picked up a rock (there are no shortage of loose rocks in Medan) and was prepared to test the theory that dogs are cowards. He saw me but just moved on. I was glad of that.
Another night J. and I walked past a stray just sleeping in the road. We didn't even see him until we were right on top of him. J. was startled and I instructed her to sneak. She said, "is he sleeping?" I said, "yes. We had better let him lie."
At the begining of her story she wrote about life in Somalia. She said that she would try to avoid gangs and other thugs to and from school. She said she and her friends would sometimes encounter dogs on the roads home from school. She used the following phrase when explaining how they handled that situation, "We would see the dogs growl, then we would stone them." In my head I held the image of this gentle girl, and others like her, pelting a dog to death with stones. I asked, "you killed it?" "What? No, we throw stones and he runs away. Dogs are cowards."
There are a few dogs on the streets of Medan. I see them most often at night as I walk back from J.'s. I saw one, he had no interest in me, but I remembered this story. I picked up a rock (there are no shortage of loose rocks in Medan) and was prepared to test the theory that dogs are cowards. He saw me but just moved on. I was glad of that.
Another night J. and I walked past a stray just sleeping in the road. We didn't even see him until we were right on top of him. J. was startled and I instructed her to sneak. She said, "is he sleeping?" I said, "yes. We had better let him lie."
posted by athensinternational at 7:42 PM
2 Comments:
How would you like it if somebody tried to stone you? Huh? Huh?
Dog-hatin' bastard.
[She said, "is he sleeping?" I said, "yes. We had better let him lie."[/quote]
On our way back from a birthday party in St Cloud today my wife spotted, from a distance, construction very near REM (a group home we used to work for) and said, "I was worried for a second that they were tearing it down!".
I responded, indignantly, "They can't tear REM down. It's an institution!"
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