How I lost my heart to homeless tail-wipers
This story begins when in the spring of 2012, I got to know a Swedish woman, Ewa, who volunteered with Romanian rescue dogs and visited a kennel in Giurgiu province during his holidays. Through her, I met a woman named Iulia Capatina, who kept a rescue dog shelter called ICAR in the small village of Baneasa, in Romania.
I talked to her on Facebook and wanted to visit her shelter on my summer vacation. She welcomed me, and so I then booked flights to Bucharest, Romania, ready to spend my summer holiday for the first couple of weeks on a volunteer in Iulia’s shelter. My heart broke to see all those homeless dogs with their supplicant look behind the net fences in the shelter, and I wanted to do something for them.
Lovely furries as a reception committee
So then, in June 2012, I arrived at Henry Coanda Airport in Bucharest, where the lovely young woman Doina had come to pick me up, and the journey to the village of Baneasa began. After about an hour’s drive, we arrived at the town and Iulia’s shelter. 2-meter roof clowns and boards surrounded the shelter.
Behind the gates, there was a colossal bark concert and then a roar that commanded the man, which silenced the barking. A small and slender woman stepped out of the gate to receive me, and we quickly moved through an entrance that dogs could not slip out of it.
As I walked through the gate, dozens of hairy buddies were jumping against me. There were small, medium-sized, and huge dogs and a few puppies. Black, white, brown, gray, dotted, and patchy. Fluffy and smooth-haired, vertical, and lopeared. I had arrived in a dog lover’s paradise. Everyone wanted to get to know the new entrant, snooping, and bouncing, thus expressing their longing for love.
Everyone was eager to get their share of the scratches, and that’s what I got galore. At the same time, that man, Adrian, who had silenced the reception committee with a well-audible roar, also appeared. As I came to notice, the dogs respected him and immediately believed in his commands. When I once tried, the dogs looked at me indifferently and kept barking.
About 30-40 of the dogs were running freely in the yard of the shelter area, and the rest of those kennels surrounded it. On the edge of the shelter was a stone building that served as the residence of Iulia, her little son, and Adrian, an employee of shelter. I was able to stay in one of the rearmost rooms, and one of them served as a dining area and as a temporary assistant, an older man Stelica to sleep.
After all, the dogs were allowed to move freely in the corridors of the building, where they came to lie down on hot summer days. It was always crowded in the aisle and hallway when everyone wanted to get to a cooler place from the sun to rest.
The night of the arrival day was terrific, and the sleep was not going to work out because I was so excited, and the room was like a sauna. The air in my room didn’t get cooler until around 4:00 in the morning when I finally fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up around 10 a.m. while the sun was burning to the ceiling, warming the rooms suffocatingly warm.
After breakfast and a cup of coffee, I started to get to know the shelter and its dogs. Some were excited to make acquaintances, some curiously sidelined, and a few draw away in the yard. I asked for tools, and I started cleaning the yard of the shelter because Iulia wouldn’t let me get inside the kennels. He said it was Adrian’s job, not mine. She thought I was a guest, but I assured her I have come to work and not to vacation.
Afternoon, the sun made it impossible to work, and since there was no running water in the yard, Iulia and Stelica went to get the dogs some water from a couple of kilometers away in large plastic casks. We packed the barrels in Iulia’s station wagon, where the back seat had been removed and drove to a fountain where we filled them to the brim. We went on the way to eat in a small diner in the center of the village and bought a few water canisters for use as drinking water and a massive watermelon as a snack.
When we returned to the shelter, we started to share water with huge water tubs, where the most eager ones walked to cool their stomachs. Adrian handed water to the drinking cups for the kennels. That water search trip was an everyday thing because there was plenty of water spent on hot summer days. We also need some amount for each of us for evening washings.
The next day I decided to start brushing fluffy-haired furry snoopy, so I took reservations from eager dogs and started working. There was a lot of work when everyone wanted to get touched. While brushing it, I noticed some disgusting, black little creatures in a dog’s fur. Fleas!!! Yikes!!! Of course, I got scared because I’d never seen such creatures before.
My mother had told me about them, but I wasn’t prepared to do myself to be acquainted with them. After the initial shock, I was asking Iulia to help, and she came with a bottle containing some kind of flea-banishing liquid. That’s where I spread it with a cotton ball to that poor dog that didn’t understand my good intentions. He looked at me, mostly like I was a bit crazy. Well, he let me do my job, as I was babbling careful about him.
I got to know those little creatures more closely when, despite Iulia’s ban, I took a few small dogs in my room and sleep next to me. Ola, the size of a little Chihuahua, definitely wanted to sleep on my chest, and the fleas tasted me too to find me too bad. When I got home, I got a couple of weeks scratching myself.
Yes, the heart intruders did their job. My first two weeks’ visit to the private rescue dog shelter included a lot of moments of happiness as I was able to pet those sweet pawers abandoned by someone and give them even a momentary sense of good feeling.
On the other hand, leaving from there was also extremely hard, when I wanted to rent a truck and transport them all here to home to Finland for the petting and pampering of some animal-loving person. I was getting tears in my eyes when I had to say goodbye to those precious ones. With that evil distressing piece rising down my throat when I realized that not all of them will ever know what it’s like to be a beloved family member.
What it’s like to get a tummy full of food every day, get endless affection and scratches, enjoy playing, and fall asleep in your own safe and cuddly bed. At the time, I decided that I wanted to do everything I could to make even a few of those poor, abandoned dogs experience that happiness.
To my pack also ended up a few years later Romanian rescue dog siblings Lissu and Dede, but it’s another story, and I’ll come back to that then. That first trip also included a rather ferocious evening when a group of 30 gypsies attacked the shelter. That’s what I’ll tell you in my next post.
