My Start as an Old Cat Lady

Sometimes, life at site can get a little lonely.  So it helps to have someone else around who also doesn’t speak Khmer fluently.  Or any language fluently.  

He never really looks super happy, but he doesn't run away from me anymore!  

Meet Cat.  Well, I actually call him cha-mah, the Khmer word for cat.  But, for all intents and purposes, his English name is Cat.  Cat likes to hang around my porch a lot and has been known to sneak into my room from time to time if I leave the door open (especially if I have forgotten about a mouse trap that has gained an unfortunate resident).  Cat was a pretty skinny, little guy when we first met, but after sneaking food to him for a few weeks, he has become a regular part of the family.  My host family doesn’t always appreciate his meowing, but they bring him into the house every night and, as evidenced by his weight gain, they have started feeding him as well. 

As you can see, Cat only has three functional legs, so he’s had a pretty rough life as a Cambodian cat.  He’s got a lot of spunk and we’re not really at a point in our relationship where either one of us is willing to risk touching the other one (most animals here have fleas, rabies, or both, and I am a giant alien as far as this cat is concerned), but who knows?   We may get there one day. 

Pets aren’t really seen as companions here, but more like guard animals or they are kept around to trap mice.  Pets are so different in Cambodia that it’s a little hard to express sometimes.  I tried to explain the concept of dog food to a student the other day, and felt like a complete idiot. 

Me: “Yeah, we have these small balls of food that aren’t really food, but like a bunch of different foods put into a dried ball.  People don’t eat it, we just buy it for our dogs.”

Student: “Why don’t they just eat rice?” 

Aaaaaand of course it came full-circle back to rice. 

But seriously, it is kind of weird to think that we buy special processed food for our animals, when most people here just feed their pets whatever they have left over.  Which yes, is mostly rice. 

So hug your flea-less pets extra tight (unless you have a cobra or a fish, or something like that) and know that if you feed them rice every once in a while, they will survive.