Vets into the Wild

…continued from episode 3…

So here we are, on the island where Aphrodite was born… It was sunny, exotic, arid, like no other place we’ve been so far.

We were to stay for about 3 weeks and do a medical practice/volunteering at Paphiakos Animal Shelter, where both Andreea and Mihnea worked. The shelter consisted of the paddocks and kennels at the outskirts of Paphos, and a small animal clinic. At the time, there were about 40 donkeys, 9 horses, lots of dogs and cats and some rabbits and rodents. The clinic was reasonably equipped for a one doctor ordination (X Ray, surgery unit with inhalation anaesthesia, etc.) but we didn’t know any better and we thought it was the greatest clinic in the world. Besides, we got to stick our noses into some good books (aka Fossum & Couto & Plumb & Co.) and realised that there’s “more” out there…

So we rotated between the clinic and the shelter. 75% of the persons we worked with were British, a thing that we didn’t really expect. That ruined a lot of the exoticism of the place. We all know Brits are not the most exotic people on Earth… Ah well, we at least understood each other.

The first day our excitement was at the maximum. We were given our own apartment in a wonderful building complex with its very own swimming pool. We thought we were in heaven, for the first few hours. Than we started to remember that we were still on Earth: the temperature was as high as 40 degrees, humidity unbearable, and our ventilation system didn’t work. “No problem!”
we said to ourselves! A nice shower will solve it all! So I showered (for 5 min) and the water stopped, and never came back. Another tragedy was that also the toilet water went on sudden strike, so we were faced with a true problem. Again, no worries, Romanians are inventive people! Ovidiu came up with “operation X”: hidden by the darkness of the night, like a true James Bond… he carried water with a bucket from the swimming pool.

This minor issue being solved, we decided that we couldn’t live only on chlorinated water, and decided to eat something. But surprises seemd to keep coming. There was no gas for the stove, and even if it were any, our only pan had a hole bigger than a gastric ulcer. But we found out too late, and oil was already inside (and of course slowly slimming outside…)

But good things were about to happen.

…to be continued…

Ioana popescu