Colombian Christian Mission

COLOMBIAN CHRISTIAN MISSION
Dale and Jeanie Meade
In the jungle and prairie of Southeastern Colombia
Volume 10, Issue 12 December, 1982

(PHOTO)

Susy, Jeanie, Dale, Alex, Wendy.

ANIMALS, ANIMALS, ANIMALS.

I imagine quite a few of you have house pets. I grew up in a household where there were no pets. So when I came to South America I learned a few things about animals. I have also had quite a few experiences with them.
When we first arrived in Colombia we bought a dog and took her with us to San Jose del Guaviare. We named her "Nariz" which means "nose" in Spanish. She earned that name because she stuck her nose into everything. One night when the electricity was off we lit a candle and set it on the floor. She promptly stuck her nose up close to investigate, took a sniff, and HOWLING, off she went. She resembled a golden retriever but was deathly afraid of water.
One of the Christians found an armadillo once, but it was to small to eat. Dale brought it home for a pet. He built a wooden box for it and set the box outside our bedroom window so someone wouldn't steal the armadillo at night. Then began a series of nights with no sleep. Armadillos are night creatures and ours scratched away at his box outside the bedroom window every night until Dale decided that armadillos weren't such good pets after all. So Dale took the armadillo out in the jungle and let him go.
Not too long after we moved into our house and the bats moved in with us. They lived in the roof. They came and went every night all night and eventually we became accustomed to living with them.
We also had all the other "creatures" that one has to live with sometimes - rats, mice, cockroaches, ants, huge spiders, etc. We tried our best to get rid of them but we only stayed one step ahead of them.
Once when Dale was helping one of the Christian farmers clear off some land, he found a mall boa constrictor (about three feet long). For those of you who don't know what a boa constrictor is, it is a SNAKE! He made a small cage for it and it lived in our living room under the aquarium. When we moved from San Jose to Villavicencio we left the dog and the aquarium but took the snake. In Villavicencio we kept it in a barrel and bought baby chicks to feed to it. When we came home for our first furlough, I carried it in my backpack along with the baby supplies.
Not long after we bought the house here in Villavicencio, Dale had another idea. He thought it would be great to have a monkey for a pet. (He didn't realize he already had three.) So he searched around and found a monkey. He cleaned out the snake cage and remodeled it for his monkey. He named his monkey Hubert. Hubert wasn't too happy at first but soon began to like his new home. Dale found out that monkeys don't clean house so he had to clean the cage out nearly every day. Soon Dale built a little house out in the patio and connected a pipe to it for Hubert to hang on. Hubert didn't like this at all. He refused to go into his new house. Consequently he got wet from the rain and came down with a cold. His cold gave way to pneumonia. I doctored him with penicillin but it was too late.
We got hooked on collecting butterflies when one of our recruits took it up. We would all put on our old, beat up clothes and go running around the barrio and near-by areas with our butterfly nets and tin cans (That's where we put the butterflies flies after we caught them). We became quite famous. Our neighbors and friends would bring us specimens for our collection. Or they would come running for us when one flew into their houses. We would always carry our nets and cans with us when we went on picnics. We might find one we didn't have. Then along with butterfly hunting we would look for unusual bugs. Once when I went to play basketball with Wendy, I found a huge water roach. I wrapped it carefully in a plastic bag and took it home to Dale. He was really excited because the one he had caught had been eaten by ants. One day when we came home from an outing we found a note on the door announcing that one of the brethren from the country had left us a tarantula in a tin can. He had put it on the balcony because he didn't want any of the neighbor children to make off with it. So Dale rushed to the balcony an popped off the lid. Up and out came a big hairy leg. He pushed it back in and popped the lid back on. I might add this all happened within a matter of two seconds. We put the tarantula to sleep with chloroform and later injected it with formaldehyde to kill it. It was the talk of the neighborhood for a few days and most of the neighbors came to see it. Many of you have seen it also as we took it to the States for a display item.
Coming back from our second furlough, we decided to set up our aquarium. We bought angelfish and neons. We took out our fishnet and went tropical fishing. We caught a few little catfish, an algae eater, and a crab. A Christian from one of the country churches added a small turtle to the aquarium to create more action.
When our next door neighbor's cat had kittens, we took a female kitten to help us out on the mouseing. At first, she had a grand old time stalking through the flowerbeds and shredding all the plants. Then she took to climbing on the thirty foot banana plant and sliding down. She does a fine job catching mice, rats, grasshoppers, toads, and lizards. She had various names until we finally settled on calling her Kitty. She was a very contented cat until we bought a dog.
Dale was in Bogota one week and brought a dachshund home. The kids were delighted and promised that they would clean up after her. I have to remind them of that every day. We named her Mutt much to the dismay of one of our stateside friends who loves dachshunds. She loves to catch cockroaches and big spiders. Mutt is also a very ornery dog. She just loves to beat up on Kitty. Kitty learned very quickly how to climb the radio tower. Mutt chewed up six dolls on her arrival. One day a horse deposited a present on the sidewalk in front of our house. I decided it would make nice fertilizer for my plants so I scooped it up and put it in the flower beds in our patio. Mutt thought it was just great so she stole some of it and put it in her bed. Mind you, she didn't eat it, just slept with it! It wasn't long until she started to smell like horse manure. The kids wouldn't go near her. Dale took care of it. He dumped it out one day while she was in the house.
About a year after we had obtained Kitty, we noticed that she was getting very fat. One morning we woke to find Kitty with two kittens on the guest room bed and one she had let fall on the floor. She hadn't cleaned up any of the mess either. I showed her what she had to do and she did it. We moved Kitty and her family upstairs to one of the bedrooms. Mutt was jealous and stole one of the kittens for herself. We rescued to poor thing and kept the door shut for a few weeks so Mutt couldn't get at them. You would have thought they were her own the way she made over them. We found owners for all three. Time came to give them away, but Dale and the kids didn't want to give them away. I insisted. We gave them away.
Anytime you would like to visit us, you are welcome. Just remember that there are all kind of critters living with us. I wonder what Dale will drag home next.