Los Animales de Colombia

13 de mayo 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

Interestingly enough, I haven't seen a lot of wildlife in Colombia.  I went on a few hikes through the jungle, but didn't see anything other than birds.  There are definitely a lot of cool-looking birds here, and some weird-sounding frogs I've heard but not seen, not to mention some malicious squirrels.  Here's an animal update from the past several months.


Lulo la Gata

20 de septiembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

You may or may not know that I adopted a tiny kitten back in September and named her Lulo ( #LuloLaGata ).  My mentor, Janeth, introduced me to her maid, whose cat had had kittens, and 6 weeks after their birth, was looking to rehome them.

Lulo and her siblings, Buca(ramanga) and unidentified brother (I wonder whatever happened to him).  They survived a harrowing moto ride in the pouring rain in this box.  They were very cold and very afraid.

I picked up each kitten to decide which one I wanted to adopt.  This little one gave me a hug, and that decided it.  Colleen and I wrapped her up in a towel and took her home.

So happy and so tiny!

My students have given me a lot of shit about naming my female cat with a male name (in Spanish, names ending in -o are male and names ending in -a are female), but I wanted to name her after one of my favorite Colombian fruits.  It's a fitting name, as she's a fruity cat.  Plus, with her green eyes and orange-tinged fur around the eyes, it's like her eyes are little lulos.

Lulo la gata y jugo de lulo

My students are always coming up to me with photos of cats that need homes and offering these cats to me.  They want me to give them names like Maracuyá and Guanabana so I can have a whole fruit salad of cats.  At this point in my life, one cat is enough for me.  It turns out this little nugget is quite the handful.


17 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

I woke up the morning of November 17th sans cat.  Usually, Lulo sleeps in my bed and starts meowing and biting me around 5 am when she thinks it's time for breakfast.  Her bowl was empty and she was nowhere to be found.  I go to the kitchen and fill her bowl, hoping she'll turn up at the sound of food, but no luck.  I start freaking out and look in every drawer, cabinet, closet, and crevice (she's gotten herself trapped in a few places, including my drawers of clothes).  No cat.  By this point, Colleen is helping me look, and we're both going to be late for work.  No luck.  We look outside a little bit, calling her name, but find no sign of the little cat.  We head to school and hope she'll turn up later.

I worry the entire day of school, hoping my little baby cat is ok.  I made some signs and printed out a bunch of copies to hang up around the building after school.  My 11th grade students told me they killed her because they don't like cats (they have a very grotesque sense of humor).  They then were trying to convince me to adopt a kitten one of them had and it would be the new Lulo, or maybe it would be Maracuyá.  I tell them all I want is my Lulo back.

I made a bunch of signs to hang up around my apartment complex.

I walk home with my signs and see no sign of Lulo on my way up to my apartment.  My Spanish is still pretty terrible, so I wait a bit for Colleen to come home and help me knock on doors.  Colleen gets home, also without a sign of Lulo.  We grab our keys, posters, and tape, and head out to canvas our neighbors.

The instant we walk out the door, we hear a very familiar meowing.  We look down the stairs and who do we see but our own little monster, little Lulo!  I sprint down the four flights of stairs, grab her, and run back up and inside the apartment.

We deduce that what must have happened is she jumped out the kitchen windows (a good 5 feet from the ground).  It's possible she landed on the palm tree below the window on her way out.  I text my vet and he comes over to check out my baby.  He tells me there's nothing broken, no internal problems, just some bruising on her tailbone.  This little nugget fell four stories with hardly a scratch!

During this terrifying experience, I learned that cats can survive falls from very high up.  I also discovered that cats have nine lives, but gatos tienen siete vidas.

Unfortunately, some months later, Lulo's sister Buca (adopted by my friend Amanda) would fall out her 17-story balcony, land on a car, and not survive.  Amanda's students would then get her a hamster named Little Buca for her birthday to try to fill the hole in her heart.


23 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

It wasn't long before Lulo got herself into more trouble.  The morning of November 23, I woke up and reached for my phone (terrible habit, but one that most people in this day and age share).  I went to unplug it from the night's charge, and found that the cord was in two pieces.  My little derp had chewed through it overnight, while it was charging.

Of course I had to do some #catshaming

However, her hunger for electrocution didn't stop there.  A few weeks later, she gnawed enough of Colleen's Macbook charger to prevent it from charging.  Colleen brought it to the IT guys at school and they MacGyver'd it to work.  I also bought her a replacement cord over Christmas break (man those are expensive, damnit Lulo).


16 de enero 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

Over Christmas break, I needed someone to watch Lulo, as I only plan to subject her to the terrors of flying once - when I return to the United States at the end of my Colombian adventures.  I asked my maid Marcela (Yes, I have a maid.  Every 2-3 weeks she comes to clean my house and do my laundry for $50.000 COP, or $17 USD.) and she took Lulo to her home, as well as Courtney's cat Leo, Amanda's cat Buca, and Amanda's dog Lila.  She texted us updates about the animals every few days.

Moto-gatas

About a week after Lulo returned home from her Christmas break (she was so happy to see me!), it was time for her spay appointment.  My vet came and picked her up; she was going to stay the night at the animal hospital for her early-morning surgery.

The next day, I was out shopping and looked down at my phone - I had several missed calls, texts, and voice messages from my veterinarian.  I listen to the voice messages and am a bit puzzled...my Spanish is getting better, but I still have trouble understanding things over the phone.  I call him back and he's talking very fast with a lot of excitement in his voice.  I hear "quatro sopresitas" (four little surprises) and he says he'll send me a picture.

Quatro sopresitas.

I look at the picture and ask him incredulously, "¡¿Ella está embarazada?!" and he tells me that yes, she was pregnant.  He was already inside and saw what he thought were her kidneys, but then noticed that there were four extra ones.  He looked closer and realized they were four fetuses.  Since he was already inside (spaying is an invasive surgery in which the vet removes the uterus and ovaries), he just removed the fetuses, turning the procedure into a combination spay/abortion.

He informed me that at her age of 5-6 months, she is at the developmental stage of a 10-year-old human.  She is a small cat, and still a kitten herself, and it was not medically wise for her to bring kittens to term.  Chances are she would have died, and the babies probably would have too.  (My 11th graders still called me a murderer, despite this information.)

After keeping her under watch for a few hours, waiting until she woke up from the anesthesia, he brought her back to my home.  Poor Lulo had a cone on her head and was still pretty drugged up.  She drunkenly zig-zagged her way to my room, where she just kind of fell over and laid down pathetically exhausted.

The babies were about the size of ping-pong balls (for comparison, Lulo's head is only about the size of a tennis ball) and took up much of her abdomen, so with them gone, she looked emaciated.

Pobrecita

The vet came back a few days later to check on her and give her antibiotics, and he instructed me on how to clean her wound and told me to put bacitracin on it to speed up the healing.  Despite the cone, Lulo kept trying to bother the stitches, so I had to watch her for that.  She had to keep her cone on for about 10 days, and by that time the stitches had some time to start dissolving.

After I took off her cone, I noticed it was made from some old x-rays.

When I first found out she was pregnant, I messaged Marcela, but she had no idea when this would have happened.  The vet said the babies were only a few weeks old, placing the conception during Christmas break.  Marcela's only cat is a female, Buca is female, Leo is male but was neutered several months prior, and she said the animals never left the house.  Lulo is a sneaky little bugger, so I'm betting she found a way out, and while she was out, a gato found her and had his way with her.  Personally, I didn't even know she was old enough to be in heat, and Marcela hadn't mentioned her going into heat, but I guess she hit puberty pretty quickly.

My count is that she's used up about 4 of her lives so far: (1) covered in fleas in the cold wet box on the moto ride to school, where I adopted her, (2) when she fell (jumped?) out the fourth-story window and was lost for nearly an entire day, (3) when she ate an active charging cord and was likely electrocuted, and (4) when she was impregnated as she barely began puberty and had a combination spay/abortion.  We've gotta be careful, as she's a Colombian kitty and they only have 7 lives (or does she have 9 because she's being raised by an American?  Is it nature or nurture when it comes to superstitions?).

Anyway, flash forward to today and Lulo is a healthy little cat (though not as little as she once was!) and enjoys normal cat things, like chasing/eating bugs, meowing at nothing and sprinting quickly to other rooms, and trying to eat all my food (including but not limited to: meat, vegetables, cereal, oreos, popcorn, and more).  She's also extremely smart - if I forget to lock the window, she knows how to (and does) open it (luckily she hasn't jumped out again); she slides open my closet doors to hang out with my shoes; she opens the pocket door to the hall bathroom just enough to get a paw in, then grabs the rug and pulls it through the crack, using it as a tool to finish opening the heavy door.  As my Oma would say, she's a little stinker.

But she's my little stinker!

The Kamikaze Bird

3 de febrero 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

One sunny day in February, I was sitting at my desk during one of my planning periods, working on grading some papers.  It was hot, so I had all my windows open and my ceiling fans on high.  My classroom has two walls of windows, so it makes for a nice cross-breeze.  There's a tree right outside the window that's behind my desk, so sometimes I work to birdsong.  It's a pleasant way to work.

Or at least, it was.

As I'm working, I suddenly hear a huge THUMP and a bird lands on the floor not even two feet from my chair.  I scream and look at it; its eyes are open and it's opening and closing its beak, and then, it closes its eyes and beak and I watch the life fly from the bird.

Needless to say, I freak the fuck out and run out of my room, panicking.  I try to tell the secretary what happened, but Spanish is difficult in my frightened state.  Through a combination of stuttering Spanglish and sign language, I get the point across.

I'm still hyperventilating, so I go tell Colleen what happened - she has a class, but it's only a few students due to a field trip.  She and her students all come look at the bird, and I notice that an entire wing landed a full 6 feet away from the rest of the bird.

These little doves are called abuelitas - little grandmas

Maintenance comes to collect the carcass, and the cleaning lady cleans the floor, but by the time my next class begins, there's still feathers EVERYWHERE.  I tell my students the story, and explain why the windows on the tree-ward side of the classroom are now closed.  One of my seniors looks up at the wall and asks, "Miss, is that blood?"  I had an entire class of 10th graders in my room for an hour and no one noticed that I had a big splatter of blood and guts up on my wall near the ceiling where the bird must've hit after being thrown from the fan before it hit the ground.  I tell the cleaning lady and she calls maintenance, and they say they'll come back and clean that after school when I no longer have students in my room.  So I get to stare at it the entire rest of the day.

Interpret the blood spatters how you will.

For months I've been terrified to open the windows on that side.  Birds still get in through the vents above the windows, the skylights, the windows on the other side of the room, and the door, so it's a dumb fear.  I've only recently started to sometimes open those windows again on really hot days.  I get sad every time I see one of those little abuelitas walking around.


The School Squirrels

13 de mayo 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

Colegio Panamericano has a thriving squirrel population.  Part of the reason these squirrels are doing so well is that the kids feed them.  These squirrels have no fear and will come right up to you while you're trying to enjoy your empanada.  I had one nearly climb onto my foot before I ran away (squirrels aren't my favorite).

They're kinda cute, until you're afraid they're going to attack you.

A few weeks ago, I saw a few boys from elementary feeding a squirrel.  One boy was hand-feeding it and petting it as it ate.  His friend then threw a bottle cap at the squirrel, and when I yelled at him for (1) cruelty to animals and (2) littering, and told him to pick up the cap and throw it in the garbage, he seemed scared to approach the squirrel.  Nevertheless, I persisted.  He tried to walk away, but I kept telling him he needed to pick up the cap and respect the environment and the animals that live in it.  He was still afraid, as the squirrel was still there, looking for more food.  Eventually, the boy that was hand-feeding the squirrel walked over and picked up the cap, just so I'd stop and they could leave.

Last week, a few of the teachers were sitting at the bottom of the stairs to the high school, below a tree, deciding where we were going to go to celebrate the beginning of our three-day weekend.  Pieces of fruit keep falling from the tree above, and we look up and there's a squirrel sitting up there throwing these down at us like little bombs.

Earlier this week, Nestór, the physics teacher, told me that recently there was a squirrel sitting in the little tree right outside the science rooms.  The students looked out the window and screamed - the squirrel was eating a bird!  It was eating one of the little abuelita doves, spitting the bones onto the ground as it gnawed down on the flesh.

These squirrels are vicious little buggers.  I feel I have cause to be afraid of them now.