Cat People

For as long as I have been alive, I have been a dog person. I was barely more than a year old when we got my first dog, my first memory was her chewing on my ears when I was wrapped in a particularly thick blanket against the cold Virginia winter. Dogs have protected me, kept me company, warned me about visitors, slept on my bed and eaten my pizza crusts more than I could write in five books. Indeed, of the photos I brought from the United States, nearly 25% are of dogs ALONE. Simply, it is impossible for me to create an image of who I would be without the influence of man’s best friend.
However, I am a realist. Idealists, despite all the talk about star-eyed hippies in the Peace Corps, don’t last very long. I understand I have nowhere near the space or budget to feed a dog in my current lodgings. Distances are such that I leave my post for weeks at a time for training, vacation and medical attention. Additionally, due to my vermin problem (specifics are classified pending my return to the United States) a cat is an eminently practicable solution. The catch is that the solution is to trade ten vermin problems for one, even if he is a little bit more sociable.
Of course, I can’t let him outside my walled concession because he would likely be eaten, run over by an errant zemijan or harassed by kids. This leaves him feeling a little cooped up now and then. For instance, he was feeling so sprightly after I fed him milk the other day he decided to wash it down with a whole bag of tomatoes while I was having a vitally important conversation about work opportunities with my boss from my NGO. Angry as I was, I have learned (as most new volunteers have at this point) that actually beating your cat is a poor return on your $1 investment.
Thus, one has to come up with alternative punishments. The first was actually bathing the little guy, and that came about after he swam into my wastewater, gracing my apartment with the molding refuse odor that I try so hard not to let it achieve.* I smeared shampoo on him, dunked him in the water and noticed that he didn’t seem to meow as much while he was wet. I squirreled this fact away, and the next time he stole one of my packets of peanut butter, I was ready. I threw him into my shower water and I was under the impression he was most distressed. Actually, he was just vengeful. Not an hour later I both started and finished a shower scented with cat pee bath salts. Since then, we’ve reached equilibrium where I just wet his feet if he makes me angry. Keeping his genitalia out of the water makes it more likely I smell better after my showers than before.
The worst part about this whole process is that we do it en masse. I am extremely jealous that Molly’s store-bought princess got the first confirmed rat kill out of the three of the Pehanko volunteers. Also, I find it hilarious that Sara’s petit chat is such a fraidy-cat he runs away from the other much smaller kittens. If you add our cat conversations to the amount of medication we take and multiply by the frequency we discuss incontinence, you would estimate the average age of a Volunteer serving in Peace Corps Benin was a sprightly 87.