The Pregnant Street Dog Ate Your House

The Spring of 2018 was a wild time. Our region’s airports had been shut down by the surrounding powers. Militias funded by foreign regimes lurked at many of our borders, meaning Mercenary Dan would occasionally call me up trying to sell me armored convoys. There were rumors the only land border still open to us would soon be taken over by the hostile central government. And all the while I was trying to manage an earthquake relief project while also co-leading a young and messy church plant.

In the midst of all of this, we had a family wedding to attend in the US. We decided to go and take the risk of getting stuck out of the country, given the fact that we had been stuck in for so long. Adam*, who was recently back in his homeland after a decade in the UK, and struggling with some of the most intense reverse culture shock I’ve ever seen, had recently decided his calling was to start an NGO focused on caring for the street dogs of our city. Right as we were leaving, he texted me to ask if he could use our courtyard as temporary housing for a pregnant street dog he had found.

My answer was an unequivocal no. We were living that year in another missionary’s furnished home, which they in turn were renting from a fiery older feminist landlady. “I would go down and join the protests, but I’m too old now to run once the bullets start flying,” she had growled once while hosting us for tea. Needless to say, we wanted to stay in this woman’s good graces.

Now, our cities do have the scrawny little street dog types so common all over the world. But we also have street dogs that are the descendants of the enormous mastiffs that have been the working dogs of our Central Asian mountains from time immemorial. These yellowish-tan dogs can get massive, sometimes as big as donkeys, with huge, solid heads and jaws you’d never want to feel the force of. They were bred to guard sheep and fend off wolves, after all.

The pregnant mama dog that Adam had decided to rehabilitate was one of these mastiffs. But as I had clearly told him no, I left town and didn’t think anything more of it. Little did I know that while we were trying our best to cross a bottle-necked land border without being turned into cigarette smugglers, Adam had decided he would risk it anyway and lodge his pregnant canine project in our courtyard. After all, he thought, what could go wrong? It would only be for a few nights until a better situation could be found. The poor girl was pregnant and needed to be taken care of.

A couple of weeks later, we were wrapping up our short trip to the US and scheming for how to get back in-country when I got the message from Adam.

“Hey, bro! Glad you’re coming back soon. Hey… I have some bad news. The pregnant street dog ate your house… Sorry.”

I read the message and understood the individual words, but did not understand the actual meaning of the sentence. The pregnant street dog ate my house???

I got Adam on the phone as soon as I could. It was then that I learned that he had put the dog in our courtyard even though I had told him not to. That was bad enough. But apparently, the dog had been either really hungry or really frustrated at being cooped up because she had proceeded to scratch and gnaw two huge holes in the house’s front siding. The external walls of the house were made of cinder blocks covered in a thick layer of styrofoam, itself covered by a small layer of hard coating. This kind of siding was a newer attempt in our area to keep the cement blocks from absorbing so much of the summer heat and turning the house into one large oven for humans.

As Adam did his best to drum up sympathy for his trespassing and destructive guest, I remembered from a random childhood experience that styrofoam was technically edible. Perhaps the dog had gotten some pretty crazy pregnancy cravings, and, unable to satisfy these, had gone for the only somewhat-edible thing around. The size of the dog meant it had no problem breaking through the few millimeters of hard coating so that it could get at the styrofoam underneath. What its ravenous activity left in its wake were two large round areas of exposed cement – scarred with massive claw marks – framed by a bright white border of crumbling styrofoam. From the pictures Adam sent me, it was like someone had taken a shotgun to the front facade of our house and left two big holes the size of small doorways.

The landlady was going to kill me.

However, there was nothing to do other than begin the long trek home. After three flights, two overnight layovers, a four-hour bus ride across the border, and a seven-hour drive back to our city, we finally rolled up to our house. My wife and I surveyed the damage.

In the midst of what had been bright tan-colored siding, two roundish, dark grey cement scars glared out at us. As we stared, the wind blew, causing the courtyard to swirl with little styrofoam bead tornados. A plastic yard toy of the kids was over in one corner, mangled beyond all recognition. Dogzilla had indeed left her mark.

The following week was spent searching the bazaar trying to find the exact same kind of siding and color of paint so we could do a patch job. We never found an exact match (the sun fades paint and building products disappear from the market quickly) but we got pretty close. Our elderly landlady seemed disgruntled by it all, but since we paid for everything ourselves, she put up with it rather better than I expected. I did hear that after we moved out she may have been a little more open with others about her true feelings. Not at all that I blame her. A giant pregnant dog had taken large bites out of her property.

Adam, appearing very sorry for what he had done, promised to make it up for me by building us a doghouse for free some time. He kept his word when a few years later he built us a doghouse for our little black German shepherd puppy. However, Adam’s NGO for street dogs never exactly took off. Some ideas just aren’t meant to be.

As for the pregnant mama dog, Adam used wooden pallets to build her a dog house on an empty lot – which she then promptly abandoned. Alas, she was wild and free, a descendant of the great mountain dogs of old. Even though she was with child, she would not be constrained to human notions of domesticity. She would do what was necessary to maintain her freedom – even eating chunks out of the sides of houses.

There are many sentences I never expected to hear as a missionary. But among the most surprising has to be the one Adam sent me that Spring morning:

“The pregnant street dog ate your house.”

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*Names changed for security

Photos are from Unsplash.com