One thing I cannot stand.

In Ampangan Woh, the view of the jungle is beautiful. Every morning on my way back from the shower I have to stop and turn around, and look out over the valley at the incredible green that is the mountain rising beyond the river, and the purest blue that is the sky before the afternoon storm clouds roll in. When I wake up in the middle of the night and step outside to use the bathroom, I am sill mesmerized by the sheer number of stars in the sky. The food is delicious and fresh – everything just picked from outside the house or brought in from deeper in the jungle. My hosts are welcoming and kind, and my students are (mostly) attentive, hardworking, inspiring, and fun to teach. I wake up every day thinking how lucky I am to be here, how incredibly different this place is from any other I have ever – or, likely, will ever – see.

But I just cannot stand the shooting of the dogs with slingshots.

It bothers me so much that I have actually yelled at kids for it, and stolen their slingshots away. For the first few months that I lived here, I tried to write it off as just another cultural difference – one that it is neither my responsibility nor my right to try to change. Now and then I would comment on it, or rhetorically question children as to what the dog had done to deserve such treatment (usually the answer was somewhere along the lines of “teacher, he is always noisy,” or, more simply “they’re bad”), but for the majority of the past seven months, I took no drastic measures. I suppose the last straw for me was back in October, when one of the dogs gave birth to five adorable puppies. For a few weeks, these puppies were the darlings of the village – children petted them carefully, pointed them out to me, even carried them up the rocky hill when the path was too steep for their little puppy paws. The love for the puppies faded, however, as their eyes opened and they started to stray further and further from their mother. Soon they, too, became targets for the slingshot-wielding boys, but their small bodies, apparently, couldn’t take it as well as the older dogs. By the middle of November, all but one of the puppies was dead (at the time of writing – January – he still survives, and is doing well. He’s been adopted by one of the families here, and seems to be well cared for). I am no vet, but it seemed to me that their slingshot wounds got infected and they were not able to recover.

As all of this made me madder and madder, I decided to dedicate my monthly project for January to teaching the children of Ampangan Woh – the older students were somewhat involved as well, but the project mostly targeted the young and impressionables – to treat the animals with whom they share their village with respect and kindness. The project included a series of discussions about why it is important to do so: we talked about how the dogs, especially the puppies, are much more helpless than their human counterparts. We also addressed the reasons that some of the dogs are “bad” – we used some class time to talk about how dogs who are beaten – or slingshotted – become afraid of people and why they respond to violence in kind. We also watched a few animal-centric movies (most importantly, Ice Age and 101 Dalmatians, both of which were big hits and have been re-requested several times since) and talked that specifically represented animals as sentient and sympathetic, and negatively affected by humans.

The most fun part of the project: one afternoon I gathered the kids I could track down and we whipped up a batch of no-bake dog treats: essentially peanut butter, flour, and oats, mixed into one delicious and sticky mess. They “chilled” – as much as could be expected in the jungle – overnight, and I told the kids all to come back the following day when they got home from school to hand them out. A couple were eager, and came straight to my house demanding, “Teacher, where are the cookies for dogs?” so I gave them each a couple and we set off in search of dogs. They weren’t hard to track down, but when they came over the kids grew suddenly terrified of holding their hands out to the dogs. I decided to lead by example and carefully held out one of the peanut butter balls – a little nervous myself, to be honest. She sniffed it warily, lifted it carefully out of my hand by the very edges of her teeth, and then devoured it. Nearly as nervous as my students were the dogs, who generally live by a principle along the lines of “beware children bearing gifts.” In fact, I tossed one to a particularly timid dog who wouldn’t even come near us, and he ran away yelping. Eventually, though, they seemed to decide that the smell of peanut butter was too delicious to resist, and as they came around, so did the kids. They, following my lead, started carefully handing out their treats, to the growing delight of the dogs. The kids were literally shrieking with laughter as the dogs licked their fingers, and when I explained that a lick is a dog’s kiss, that was too much for them. We returned over the next couple days, with more and more people willing to participate, and we are now the heroes of the dogs – they follow the kids and me everywhere we go, and the slingshotting, while not completely gone, has decreased exponentially.  

Susahid, age 6, with the puppy

Students making dog treats to pass around