Being the Bigger Dog

It’s raining her in Santo Domingo (thank god, if you saw my earlier post), and with little else to do, I thought I would introduce you to my apartment and Cana, my “sidekick/security.”

When I arrived in Santo Domingo, I spent a week looking for a place to live. It’s not hard to imagine that as a humanitarian worker I don’t get paid a whole lot for my work.  Okay, I make squat… $800 a month (I’m also basically volunteering for experience as a Global Fellow).  Yeah, not the glamorous life that you probably thought all of us humanitarians get for saving the world.  I really only had a few requirements for an apartment when I first got here. One, it had to be walking distance to work and (2) under $300 (that was all my non-profit and I had allotted for housing).  Just to clarify, from this $$ I was suppose to pay for insurance, food, housing and give a month donation to my flight down here.  Don’t get me wrong, I agreed to all of this, so the non-profit that I work for has no responsibility to any of this.

Well, after searching high and low in the Zona Colonial (Colonial Zone, Santo Domingo) and realizing that “Gringo” prices were $400+, I took the first place that I could for $200 a month.  It paid for one bedroom in a 3-bedroom apartment that just happened to be resident free at the time.  Included came…. A full kitchen (I wasn’t suppose to have to buy anything, ha!)….a bed…. a mosquito net…. and that pretty much sums it up. No internet, no TV, no air-conditioning, no hot water (very common here).  Turns out that I wasn’t in the Zona Colonial either, I was in a barrio (neighborhood) called San Carlos (which is right next door to Zona Colonial). 

What the hell does any of this have to do with my sidekick/security?  Well it literally started the second night that I was in my new apartment. I ended up having to work late… past the point where the sun was already down and it was dark, especially with little to no street-lights.  Now coming from Chicago I really don’t have a ton of fear walking by myself at night or really consider myself a target for most people.  Let’s face it, I’m a 5’9” white girl that has about 30 lbs. on anyone that could want to target me. Hey I also played soccer for 15 years, and I’m pretty accurate with male anatomy so I don’t think if it came down to it I couldn’t do serious harm to someone (male of course) that came after me.

But on the second night that I was here, walking home along Benito Gomez (ha, try this on for size, I’m a half Mexican that lives between streets named Benito Gomez and Mexico…hahaha) and I was SCARED. Not like hey this is a little weird and not really fun, it was a HOLY SHIT MAYBE I SHOULD RUN kinda scared.  I made it home safe and sound that night but when I got to work the next day (even in daylight it’s still creepy, but just in the uncomfortable way) I just said, nope sorry that was one scary walk home. I want a dog to come with me.

Everyone, meet Cana; Cana meet the lovely readers.

 (the booties are another story)

So this is Cana, I rescued her from what can only be described as the Dominican Version of a non-profit dog rescue (I will omit the name), I’ll call it the shelter. It wasn’t an easy choice picking her, she was younger than I had hoped, and considering that I had never owned a dog before, I was worried about taking a puppy home (I have a long history of making really rash decisions, ex. It only took me a week to figure out I wanted a car, get a loan, and buy it…2 states away).  But she’s a beautiful sunny blond color and was the only younger dog to be barking, so I thought what the hell.  My mom’s advice, buy one that barks and bites… lol, thanks mom… I actually took that into consideration after you said that.

Finding a name for her took my entire office. I wanted something Dominican for her (she’s a her FYI). We first thought Domi (pronounced Dom-e) but after a day my boss pointed out that when I took her back to the US with me, the Spanish name would sound a whole lot like Dummy. So we changed it to Cana, short for DominiCANA. Hey original, I liked it.

The one thing the shelter didn’t tell me, my beloved Cana was afraid of EVERYTHING. It took me a good 2 days before she would even walk (and yes I had to CARRY her to work). Once I got her to walk, she would stop every 10 ft and refuse to move.  I noticed that her triggers were dark colored Dominicans, usually of Haitian descent, loud noises, cars, people (some more than others) and yeah, pretty much anything else you could think of.   

It turns out that the “security dog” that I had adopted, needed me to be her security instead of the other way around. Go figure.  She didn’t bark either.  I knew she could, she had done it at the shelter… but I was convinced (along with the co-worker who helped pick her out) she had somehow gone mute.  HAHAHA. If only.  The barking came after 3 weeks and a little boost in her confidence and a whole lot of love from my office (thanks guys!).

So she’s good at barking at the office and at my apartment, the two places that she spends 98% of her day at. Her insecurities issues still plague me on our way to and from work. Most of the time she’s choking herself on her collar as I try to hold her back from running away from things (or pull her forward when she’s too scared to move for that matter), or trying to walk between my legs and tripping me.  It’s amazing that I haven’t taken a face plant so far… and believe me, Santo Domingo is not someplace where you want your face to meet the concrete… EVER.

One thing that I have yet to inform you of is the huge amount of street dogs that freely roam around the city.  It’s extremely common here for puppies to be thrown out into the street because families just don’t want them (I have a very sad story about this that I might share when I’m just really depressed sometime). The street dogs usually congregate on corners with 1 or 2 other dogs, close to a trash drop point (another story) and get fiercely territorial when another dog approaches their “zone” for lack of a better word. The National Police (NP) are not looked on in the Dominican favorably by many, but for the first several weeks, I only escaped dog barking, growling and would be attacks by the NP or other good natured citizens stepping in to help scare the dogs away.

I learned this lesson very quickly.  When a dog comes at you (well me and Cana), you have to be the bigger dog.  Fear might tell you to run away, and in many cases I’m sure this is the best idea… because I would totally do the same thing in the states (my sister got run over by a dog once and neither of us have forgotten it).  Instead, you have to look like an idiot, putting your hand in the air waving frantically and step TOWARDS them. No, it sounds stupid, it sounds really stupid writing it out for the public to read, but it’s the truth. Cana at first would bark at them since I was scared shit and would let me 4 month old puppy do the fighting, but once I got over my fear she’s pretty much stopped (she hides behind me now).

Oh dear reader, I wish I could take a picture of the gringa doing this in the middle of a busy street in Santo Domingo.  I look like a freakin idiot, and yes I shamefully admit to that.

I guess the crazy thing about now having a dog that is afraid of everything, is that she is still REALLY effective.  Women move out of the way, mothers grab their children… men stick out their hands to say hello and Cana runs to my other side to get away (so maybe not so effective with men… which again just goes to defeat the purpose of a security dog). Who knows, maybe I should have bought a bigger dog, but I would never subject a huge dog to the heat that we are facing or the higher temps everyone has promised me are coming.

The best part is, I’ve decided that living in a sketchy neighborhood, with no air-conditioning, no TV, no reliable internet (another story, yes again) and cold water was just NOT survivable.  Instead I’m doubling my rent and moving closer to my office, that also houses a 12 yr old Doberman Pincher that it half my height, and a 2 month old lab.   So instead of being my Security, Cana has become my sidekick… and even without the security dog, she’s still pretty awesome J.