Smol dog blo mi i lus!?

So after coming back from Santo for about two weeks I was hanging around on campus and expecting to see my dog. One good thing about living on a campus with other teachers is I can ask everyone to look out for my dog while I’m gone and island dogs are super easy to care for (the largest food group consumed being garbage). Unfortunately when I did ask about my dog nobody seemed to know where she was. I quickly learned that she was “just here” yesterday and that they saw her a lot when I was gone. Another thing I learned was that one teacher said they went fishing and caught a poisonous fish, which was then fed to my dog but it’s OK because she survived. Things weren’t looking good in my search for my dog as a few days went by and people said they just saw her at some other village and when I asked where that village was to go check it out they couldn’t be too specific. I knew unless I took some action I’m most likely never going to see my dog again so I made a public notice (publik notis, pic below). It’s pretty self-explanatory and there was quite a large photo of her which I took before she was missing. Anyway a few days go by and as I walk up and down West, so many people came up to me asking if I found my dog and I had to keep answering no, but have you seen her? No leads was bringing me closer to despair and having to accept I’ll probably never see her again.

A week later I was waiting with 100 or so Ni-vans for the E Queen which had a bunch of cargo on it people were waiting for. I happened to buy a mountain bike from a volunteer in Vila, a pretty nice one and it was on the boat. As I was waiting for it there was talk that somebody found my dog and that they were bringing it to me now. I was filled with cautious optimism because if it wasn’t my dog I would’ve been pretty disappointed. As I was the only white man surrounded by a bunch of Ni-vans this man comes down the road holding a dog and everyone is looking at him, who’s looking at me. Pretty much anything I or any other white man in the country does you get stared at a lot, and that’s just something you learn to accept. Now you can imagine in a country where people kick dogs that when a Ni-van dude is walking towards a crowd actually carrying a dog in his arms people are gonna stare at that. He walked up to me and handed me my dog and she freaked out, she was super happy to see me and started crying and licking my face. She didn’t take two steps away from me after that and followed me everywhere I went, and eventually the E Queen came with my bike, so I would say it was a good day.