Where's Gerber?: One Man’s Garbage is Another Dog’s Dinner.

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I love you. I care for you. And I don't say it enough....

Manditory Viewing Prior to Reading (1:35min). There is a War going on For Your Mind.

Since I arrived here in Brazil. I have been fighting a battle of frustration with our dogs over control of the trash cans. It is a battle of sheer Will against sheer Hunger. The castle that I defend consists of 3 large steal trashcans inside of a 5foot by 5foot wooden fence…that sits just behind the play ground. Every morning, I awake to find shreads of food packages, toilet paper, stuffed animals, and dirty diapers (and one morning parts of a dead beaver) spread across the lawn, under the swings, and around the sand box.

The scene can be gruesome ....and gag reflex inducing. My sense of cleanilessness gets pushed over the edge when the lil kids come running from the house, skipping through the trash, and the work weary adults walk by with complete indifference (its’s like a shocking scene from a Banksy mural). So I - being the overly-helpful, americano that I am - started fighting the war by methodically clearing the battle field of trash each morning as our pack of guilty dogs lay on their sides in the morning sun. (sleeping off their midnight garabage binge) Despite the well-constructed wood and cement fotress that surrounds our trash cans, my K-9 enemies mysteriously always find a way to storm the gates and eat their fill.

Now don’t misunderstand me… I love the dogs and they love me. They give the house and the farm a great sense of security - especially the German Shepards. And the dogs are a great source of natural therapy for our kids. We have one lil boy, who is aggressive and distant with all the adults, but around our dogs he is sweet, caring, and smiling. This is just another example of CLM’s miraculous ability to heal broken lives (human and dog alike). CLM has a passion of taking in strays…Well, stray dogs have a passion for CLM, anyway (Viktoria loaths them). Muts of all colors and sizes just wander to the farm and never leave. At the moment, our pack of roaming “pets” totals 1 kitten, 9 dogs, and 2 puppies.

The concept of spading and nuttering animals is completelynone existent here in Brazil. Cats, however, are rare sight in the colony…thanks to dogs. As you drive through the Brazillian section of the colony, you cannot go half a block with out swerving to miss a skiny, tan dog, with a black snoat.. (Mike is convinced that this is the dominate combination of genes for dogs everywhere in the world. Mike has traveled and worked in the Middle East, the US, and Brazil and swears that the exact same stray dogs that walk the streets in warzone middle east and poor Brazillian neighborhoodswalk the streets in Canton, Ohio)

The place where the tide of trash finally broke (the last straw)....

The dogs may have won our first few battles…but last week I pulled out the big guns. I spent the morning reenforcing the trash can shed – I added boards around the bottom of the fence, replaced the missing slates, and strenghtened the latch. While, I was doing this Everton (4) was helping the war effort by pushing nails through pieces of rotten fruit – creating extremely sticky and dangerious midevil-esc weaponary. (see the picture below).

Thus far operation “Trash in, Dogs Out” has been succesful. However, my victory has created unexpected colatoral damange….Now the stray dogs are hungry, and they follow me around wimpering and dancing…begging me to feed them…everytime I feed Mike and Mary’s two dogs. There is one dog, Creepy Gripe, who is wearing down my sentimental fortidude. Her name is Creepy Gripe because gripe means “sick or cold” in portueguese, and this poor dog has some sort of skin disease that indeed makes her look creepy. Creepy is too small to compete with the German Shepards and other dogs for after-dinner scraps. So she lays infront of the house like a furry door mat quitely whimpering everytime I step over her. I am unsure how long my tough guy act can hold agianst those sad, watery eyes longingly gazing up at me…I am softie afterall, and I think Creepy Gripe knows it.

The lesson I am learning from my aftermath of my battle with the dogs is…beware of the unforseen consequences of your actions...whether good and bad… realize the effects of our lives spread out like ripples in pond. My battle with the dogsis is choas theory on a micro level…and I’m sure the ripples extend so much further. I don’t really have any great wisdom of advice of the unforseen consequences of our lives, but I think just acknowledging that our touches, our actions, and our words have the earthshaking power to alter the world around us is a humbling and awe-inspiring feeling. It might make you watch were you step next time you walk outside so you don’t crush a bug and accidently usher in the second age of the dinoscors…or more lilkely – hopefully this realization pops in our head during your next fight, frustrations, or apethetic moment… I hope that at moment I am able to understand how delicate each relationship I enter into really is…

Here’s a few random examples of the dangers of unforseen consequences….

1. The harsh economic restirctions forced on Germany after WW1, which were suppose to keep Germany from gaining military power in the future, actually created the political, emotional, and economic circumstances that allowed Hitler to take power. Ooooops….(excuse the dark humor)

2. In the 1960s, the US got into a trade disagreement with Europe over chicken imports and exports. In retiliation to the disagreement, law makers slapped a very high tax on all imported small trucks from Europe (specifically to screw over VW). This tax created a huge competitve advantage for US automakers to make and sell trucks to Americans. So US auto makers designed their business plans to exploit this advantage – then, as we all know, the truck market tanked and it left US auto makers with a huge hole in their projected budgets and (because of their reliance on the truck market) at a serious disadvantage in the compact car market. I mean serriously….thousands of people are losing their pentions and jobs in Detriot because of 1960’s Eurpean Chickens –What The Cluck?

3. Personally, I am realizing that I tend to look for the easiest paths to comfort – to food, to sleep, to rest, to entertainment. And in my race to comfort, I usually produce the colatoral damange of neglected and damanged relationships. I see some thing that makes me uncomfortable (like trash) and I rush to hide it – to make it go away. However, CLM is making me believe that comfort might be enemy, and it is the Uncomforts we enter into the produces the best of the unexpected consequences life has to give….

The moral of this very strange blog post then… is to look beyond the immediate and see the eternal…bypass the comfortable moments and dive into the uncomfortable whenever possible….realize that one man’s trash is another dog’s dinner.

Manditory Viewing Again...After Reading (1:35min). There is a War going on For Your Mind.

grace.peace.gerbs