Hey everyone, I finish working at Casa around my birthday and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, so I thought I'd let you know how things are going for me.
Enemies
There are two different routes we can choose to go from the town to the orphanage, the caminho longo and caminho corto (long and short way) - the problem with the short way is that it involves going up a massive hill and the narrow road is full of crater-esque holes. You have to be really careful riding down and riding up is a job only for iron-man. The problem with the caminho longo is that it is a good 7kms longer and the dogs. Xerem is full of street dogs, but in town they tend to behave OK (although the other day on my friend's motorbike we almost collided with a scared horse that was being chased by a stupid dog). On the caminho longo, in the middle of a bush, the dogs aren't very nice. A little over a month ago I was riding on the caminho longo to go to a local bar with some friends, it was sunset (which is really quick here cos we are so close to the Equator)and I was taking in the beautiful hills and green pastures, thinking about how hard it is to capture their beauty with a camera, when some angry dog came out of the fields and started barking at me, chasing me and snapping it's jaws in the air. It was about the size of a border collie but it was still scary. I wanted to ride faster but this only makes them chase you more, and it would come really close to me and I would yell at it and every time I yelled I think it got a bit scared and would back off for a bit before coming back again. After a while it seemed to have given up, but when I went around the next corner 5 dogs were waiting for me, it was a bloody ambush! Most of them were small but the biggest and angriest one was about the height of a labrador. This time I got off my bike and walked very slowly, but again they were barking and snapping their jaws at me and the dog from before must have heard the party and came back too. It was really scary because they had me surrounded, I was trying to keep the bike between me and the dogs and was looking for a stick to hit them with. I really wanted to kick them in the face but I was worried about getting bitten. It's also scary because there's just nobody around. Luckily a car came past and for whatever reason it seemed to scare them off for a bit and they ignored me for long enough for me to get out of there.
I no longer take the long way, but there are so many street dogs in Xerem and on the way home I ride past a pit bull and I just want to buy a shotgun and kill them all, dirty disease ridden social menaces!!
