
You never know what to expect in a day here.
#1 Last night during dinner, a beggar rang our doorbell. He asked for some food and James said, Sure, we we've got bread (we were eating grilled cheese), the man said, no, I've gotten lots of bread lately, I want some beans and rice. James told him we don't have any beans and rice. The man then asked for money.
People want you to give and help but only on their terms. It is amazing how often people turn down help because it isn't exactly what they wanted.

2. This morning when I got up, there was a strange dog in my front yard. He was very small and fit right in between the bars. I told him to leave and he didn't go. Finally I got out the water hose and sprayed him out. He crawled out into my garbage can and was too small to jump to the ground so I ended up having to pick him up anyway. (Please note that this entire time I am having to harden my heart to this cute little guy.) About 2 hours later my big black dog discovered that this little guy had snuck back into our yard and was hiding out behind a bush.
We let him stay in our yard all day but didn't give in to feeding him. (One of the other neighbors had put water out for him earlier.) James finally carried him down the street and around the corner in an attempt to get him to leave our street.
Why won't you keep him or at least feed him, you might ask? 1. We already have two dogs and that is plenty. 2. Just recently some of our neighbors adopted a street dog. They set up a make shift home and all took turn feeding him as well as vaccinating him BUT he still lived in the street. We began to have a horrible trash problem. Every day there was trash everywhere and along with the trash came much discord among the neighbors. SO, if we feed the dog he will stay and we just can't do that.
Now for the end of the story. Tonight as we got in the car for church, the little dog crawled out of our bushes and said hello. We all got in and as we pulled out we heard a yelp. He had not moved from under the car. As we pulled away I prayed with a heavy heart that he would have died and not just been injured. He was already starving to death and faced a horrible future of starvation or abuse or both.
This is new for me, having to harden my heart. There are just SO many street dogs that keeping one draws others.

One more story. We had a street dog that we loved, Velho (old man) was what we called him. You might remember my past blogs on him. About 3 months ago Velho got a bunch of friends. Our one street dog grew into about 6 just on our little street. Some were not as friendly as velho and one often growled at Daniel when he played in the street. Anyhow, suddenly in one week 22 street dogs died. We have heard it was the city government controlling the population of strays. It is horribly sad and we lost Velho during this time. The above picture is our 2 dogs out playing with Velho.