Notes on Life in Sentani....

We've had a fairly uneventful week up until today. Hugo was busy working on finishing up the installation of the new radio stack in the caravan.
This afternoon Aidan came running in the house and told me to come because an Indonesian girl had been attacked by a dog. So I went out to check it out and sure enough a little girl of about 10 had been fairly badly bitten on the back of her leg. One of the other expats had come too and was going to take the girl to her parents and see what they wanted to do. Unfortunately the owners of the dog were in Jayapura when it happened. The little girl was very brave and we got her over to our porch and I cleaned up the wounds with some clean water until the other expat came and got her. Poor kid, I felt so bad for her and she was being so brave about it. It turns out that the dog had just given birth earlier that day in a ditch that ran underneath a driveway and the girl was between the mother dog and the puppies in the ditch. So the mother dog was just acting on instinct and trying to protect her pups. Now she will most likely be put down. I haven't heard any more news about the little girl yet. Later the people taking care of the dog for the owners managed to get the mother dog out of the ditch and lock her up. But then someone had to get the puppies or they would die. So they dug the entrance to the ditch a little bigger and one of the skinnier boys went in almost up to his ankles and managed to get all the puppies out. So that was our big excitement for the day.
Interestingly, the home that the dog's owners live in is actually a converted quonset hut that was used for storage by the American army in World War 2. The roof is still rounded and the house actually looks quite neat.