Last night I slept with don pancho

I was surprised and dismayed. Stray dogs weren’t a common sight in San Vicente. Unlike Mexico, I had never seen a dog in bad shape here. Radar, the family dog, led a charmed life, eating scraps of food, roaming peaceful streets and sleeping with a fluffy white cat on his back to stay warm at night.

The sight of the skeletal dog upset me immediately. I had a soft spot for the suffering of animals and had written about turtle rehabilitation in Mexico, bear rescue in Romania, the Friend not Food campaign against dog meat in Vietnam and a dog adoption program called Potcakes in the Caribbean. I even toted dry dog kibble through Greece. I just couldn’t let this starving dog walk past without doing something.

As it wobbled back and forth on its spindly legs as if unable to take another step forward, I thought of the chicken Mama Tallo was preparing and hurried back to the house. Surely there must be a few scraps of meat to spare.

“There’s a dog dying of starvation,” I cried out in my best Spanish, rushing into the kitchen where she was stirring a pan of rice. The chicken was evidently ready. I could see Radar crunching down on chicken bones near the doorway. “Can I have a piece of chicken?”

She looked puzzled but nodded. While she took hold of the chicken carcass to slice off a piece, I decided to run to the toilet. I’d spent a few hours drinking Gallo beer at Tia Maria’s and although I’d spent lots of time at Tia Maria’s over the years, I’d never figured out where the bano (toilet) was.

By the time I got back, Mama Tallo had prepared a full plate of food. Instead of the scraps of food I’d been expecting, there was pollo guisado (braised chicken stew), hot rice flecked with carrot plus stuffed chayote squash sprinkled with cheese. She’d even marked the bottom of my dinner plate with felt pen so if I took it back to Tia Maria’s they could tell whose plates was whose.

I winced in understanding. She had misunderstood and thought the chicken was for me. Instead of leftovers, I had an entire meal.

No matter, I’ll just give the dog a piece of the chicken and eat the rest. I ran out the kitchen, across the patio, past the metal gate and into the lane where I could just see the scrawny rear end of the dog turning the corner onto San Vicente’s main street.

I hurried down the lane, past Amalia’s house, holding the plate of chicken as steady as a server at a wedding banquet. A few kids, wondering what I was up to, followed me.

“Psst, psst,” I said to the dog. She was so far gone physically she couldn’t figure out where my voice was coming from and her head waved back and forth like a tuning fork until the aroma of the still-steaming chicken connected and she locked coordinates on me.

“Yay!” I cheered, tossing a piece of chicken thigh in her direction. She turned her head and went for it. Giddy with success, I readied another piece of chicken.

My elation didn’t last long. A shadowy movement beyond my shoulder became two large dogs, a well-fed pit bull and a black lab cross. A third hound, lounging in one of the open doorways of a store, leaped into action when it spotted the chunk of chicken in the middle of the road.

Knocking the skinny brown dog aside, the pit bull grabbed the chunk of chicken from the middle of the road and swallowed it in one gulp. The other two looked at my platter of chicken with a blood lust worthy of Visigoth invaders. The pit bull took a step forward and growled.

Thinking it was going to bite me, I dropped the entire plate. My rescue mission wasn’t going well. Despite all the chicken on the ground, the emaciated brown dog still had no clue what was going on.

The neighbours certainly did. People peered from doorways to watch the gringa throwing chicken and dinnerware on the town’s main street. A round of whispering rose. One man removed his cowboy hat to shade his eyes and get a better look. Women wiped their hands on their aprons and took seats as though settling in for an afternoon of watching telenovellas (soap operas).

Although I was embarrassed by the attention, I hadn’t given up hope that the skinny brown dog would get something to eat. She was just inches away from food. If I could just chase away one of the big dogs, she’d have a chance.

I threw my ring of house keys as hard as I could at the circle of now snarling dogs. Not one budged. Now I was in a predicament. My house keys were in the middle of a plate of chicken on the pavement. The noise emanating from the pack of snarling dogs got louder as they began fighting each other and crunching the chicken bones. The brown dog staggered away while I stood and stared, wondering how I was going to get my keys back.

Just then Javier appeared in the pickup truck, its cargo area full of lemons and papayas. Stopping in the middle of the street, he got out and walked over.

“What are you doing?” he asked, reaching down into the maelstrom of dogs, chicken, rice and dust, grabbing the dinner plate (with the Sanchez family name Mama had scribbled on the back still legible) and my keys while shoving the dogs aside swiftly with the toe of his boot.

I began explaining my chicken interlude but soon stopped, realizing how ridiculous it all sounded. Who in their right mind throws food around in the middle of town? I’d really gone too far.

“It’s an insult,” said Javier shaking his head. He obviously wasn’t amused. “Prepared food is for people not dogs. There are a lot of hungry people in this country.”

From my volunteer work with CESO in rural Honduras, where 60% of the population lived below the poverty line, I knew that was true. Dinner was often just a hot dog or a thin slice of packaged ham, a few tortillas or a scrambled egg. Some nights it was nothing at all. Guatemala was even worse off than Honduras.

According to the World Food Programme, a humanitarian agency of the United Nations, it has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean.. High poverty rates, inadequate water and sanitation systems as well as a regular schedule of natural disasters meant mostly everyone in rural Guatemala struggled to get enough to eat.

Feeding a dog the food that humans needed to eat was really shameful.

“Maybe no-one will tell Mama?” I suggested. I was really embarrassed. We were in the process of buying a house in Guatemala - how could I ever expect to fit into this community and its culture if I kept making such a spectacle of myself?

“She’ll know before we even get home,” he said.

I slunk back to Mama Tayo’s kitchen where she was making more tortillas, patting them and laying them across the comal.

I apologized, trying to explain the whole story. She prepared a plate of food just like the previous one and handed it to me with a smile.

This time I sat down and ate it myself.

The next morning, the tempting aroma of chicken broth wafted from Mama’s kitchen. Caldo de Gallina or chicken soup is traditional fare for lunch after any night of festivities. It’s intended to serve as an antidote to la goma or the hangover that followed too much revelry and consumption of venado, the locally distilled white rum.

“One Christmas morning we found Beto sleeping in the pig pen after his first binge,” laughed Javier.

“That’s not funny,” I said. According to my calculations, Beto would have been around age 11 at the time. I spooned white rice into my bowl of soup, sliced a wedge of avocado, peeled it and mashed it onto a warm tortilla, sprinkling it with a pinch of coarse salt before taking a bite.

After the previous day’s “dog and chicken” incident, I had decided to keep my thoughts to myself for awhile I had to pick my battles carefully. I’d had no success with my protestations earlier in the week when I’d seen a trio of three and four year olds lighting firecrackers in the lane. I had been so sure one of them was going to set himself on fire, I’d had to go indoors.

Javier knew me well enough to know that if I was quiet, all was not well.

“That dog had parasites,” he said. “It would have died no matter how much food you fed it.”

I ducked down to take a closer look. The box resumed its progress across the patio and definitely wasn’t being propelled by any mechanical means.

I got out of the hammock and cautiously walked around to the other side of the box, being careful to keep my distance. Maybe there was something inside the box. Like one of the snakes that had bitten Papa Nico or something worse.

On the back of the box was a panel of cellophane and peering out from behind the plastic were four blinking eyes. Two baby polomitas, the white doves that inspired the Latin American folk song, were crammed in the box like squab in a casserole dish. The fluttering of their wings was causing the box to slide across the dirt floor.

“Jesus. How did they get in there?” I asked getting ready to open the flap.

“No, no, stop,” shouted Carlitos, Beto’s eight year old son, who came running into the patio. Frenetic and outspoken, he was the ringleader among his cousins and neighbourhood kids, about half a dozen of whom were now jumping and punching each other around him.

Of all the children in the Sanchez family, Carlitos was the one child I hadn’t warmed to. He rarely smiled and I’d seen him kick dogs with no provocation. I thought he was a sociopath in the making

“I found those birds under a tree, they’re mine,” he howled, scooping the box of doves and tucking it under his sweaty arm. The palomitas eyeballs started rolling frantically as the box see-sawed back and forth.

“Not so fast. You can’t take them like that. Javier!” I shouted as the kids took off tossing the box to each other like a football.

Javier stepped out of the shower, zipped up his jeans and managed to grab Carlitos by his shirt collar as he was rounding the corner.

“Just like Beto your father used to be ...always getting into trouble,” he laughed, shaking his head in amusement. Javier thought Carlitos was adorable. The worst he behaved, the more endearing he became. .

A short discussion, with much gesturing at me, took place. Carlitos cast me a look of bewilderment, frustration and hatred but Javier returned victorious with the Tonka box and palomitas flapping even more vigorously inside.

“These birds are too young to fly,” he sighed. “If we put them back on the ground, they’ll be eaten by a cat. We’ll have to send them to Carliot’s abuelo (grandpa) in the city. He raises carrier pigeons.”

I didn’t have much choice. The birds would be going in the truck with Carlitos. What could I do? Call the International Human Society? The whole incident had the potential to turn into another “chicken and starving dog” incident.

The last I saw of the palomitas, they were headed west in the back of Beto’s pickup truck beside Carlitos. Stashed in an empty microwave box, their eyes peeked out of the handle openings in the cardboard. They still looked scared but at least they had more room.
While I’d been doing bird rescue, the rest of the town had been recovering from the previous night’s activities. As I followed Lorena next door to Tia Maria’s tienda (a ploy to distract me from the killing fields resuming in the corral near the kitchen) I could see one fellow sleeping off last night’s binge under a canopy of cascading pink bougainvillea a few doors down.

As we walked, I had to admit that it seemed hypocritical to be saving one bird and eating another. Lorena as usual managed to read my thoughts. She began asking me about my eating habits.

“Do you eat chicken feet?”

“No, not feet”

Head?

No.

No.

“No, not that either.”

“Beef?”

“Yes – sort of,” I paused “But no tongue, brains, liver or offal. Or hooves. ”

“No venado (deer), moose, porcupine, bear, iguana or any other wild animal,” I volunteered.

By the time we got to Tia Maria’s I was ready to admit that my philosophy on food really was screwed up. I was willing to eat chicken but couldn’t stomach seeing one get slaughtered? Even thinking about how I ate my pig pal as enough to bring me to tears.

Meanwhile the other women in the family- except for Lorena who was charged with keeping me away from the killing fields—were busy plucking, bleeding, eviscerating and scalding birds and I was headed to the cantina? What was wrong with me?

When I got to thinking about it, maybe my values were all askew as well.

Dog rescue? Bird rescue? It all made sense in Canada but not here.

I had never felt so confused.

Recipe: Pollo Guisado (braised chicken)

This is an easy weekday family meal. When I was in the corporate world and worked overtime, this recipe was a mainstay in Javier’s repertoire. For the best flavour, try to find free-range chicken rather than a factory-farm chicken

• 
  2 1/2 pounds chicken (thighs, legs or breasts cut in half)
  
• 
  1 tablespoon olive oil
  
• 
  1 teaspoon ground dried red chile pepper
  
• 
  1 tomato (diced)
  
• 
  1 medium onion (diced)
  
• 
  1 small green pepper (diced)
  
• 
  1 bay leaf
  
• 
  1 ½ cup chicken broth (or water)
  
• 
  1 large potato (cut into bite size cubes)
  

1. 
   Season chicken pieces with salt, pepper and chile.
   
2. 
   In Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium heat.
   
3. 
   Brown the chicken pieces on each side and remove from pot
   
4. 
   Add tomato, onions, green pepper and remaining ingredients to the pot and cook for 5 minutes until slightly soft
   
5. 
   Return chicken pieces to pot and coat with the sauce.
   
6. 
   Add chicken broth
   
7. 
   Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 35 minutes or until chicken is done.
   

Chapter 18: Househunters International