A Burial

Monday, the major event that happened was obviously baby Rodrigo coming home from the hospital. The second major event was that Duki, the family dog, was put to sleep.

Duki was a German Shepard that was 10 years old that lived on the roof of our house (this is not abnormal -- roofs in Lima are used for two things mainly -- it's where people hang their clothes out to dry and keep their dogs). Duki had an allergy to fleas, and with just one flea bite he would break out with skin rashes. Duki also had osteoporosis. On top of that, the medication he was given to fight the flea allergy was becoming less and less effective over time. Roberto spent lots of time washing Duki and putting medicine to alleviate his skin rashes. Finally, as everything was becoming more and more expensive, and Duki was suffering more and more, the family made the hard decision to put him to sleep.

So yesterday I helped Roberto dig a hole in the "back yard," which is really a patio area between the house and the houses in back and on either side (all houses are packed together very tightly). There, we laid Duki to rest.

I didn't have a particularly close relationship with Duki. I played with him some every time I went to hang my clothes up to dry. But not too much, because even though he loved to run around and play, it was terrible for his osteoporosis. Aside from that, he never really liked for me to pet/cuddle him much. I was mainly sad for Roberto and the rest of the family, who really did lose a "family member" -- they treated Duki much better than a lot of dogs around here are treated.

During lunch, Roberto (who's Catholic/not religious) and Javier (who's a member of Santa Isabel church, so he's Christian/evangelical) had a discussion about whether dogs go to heaven. They asked me what I thought. I said I hoped so, but I that I didn't know, mainly because I didn't really know of biblical evidence that suggested an answer one way or another. And any time you have an eschatological discussion from Javier, it's going to be based totally on the bible.