Digging: Thanksgiving Edition

Batman takes drugs like a champ. How is that relevant? Well last week we had her spayed and it took a horse-sized dose of ketamine to get her to go down. The vet said he’d never had that much trouble sedating a cat and now refers to her as “the stubborn one.” The upshot, however, is that she has been essentially comatose for the last week, failing to eat or drink and losing lots of weight to diarrhea. Vicki and I were so distressed we could not even imagine what it’s like for parents to watch their human children suffering. So when Thursday came around and we discovered she had also opened up her stitches and was in need of a repair job, we were not feeling very thankful for the ostensibly easy, laissez-faire experience of co-habiting with cats.

Moses was in what recreational drug users call a K-hole: a slang term for the subjective state of dissociation from the body commonly experienced after sufficiently high doses of the dissociative anesthetic ketamine. This state…is often accompanied by feelings of extreme derealization, depersonalization and disorientation, as well as temporary memory loss and vivid hallucinations.

Batman, unconscious in her crate after surgery.

Feeling less nurturing than the African bush–which they both survived after wandering away from home at the age of two weeks—I headed out to water some sorry-looking plants only to discover four tomatoes ripening on the vine! Despite uneven rains, some bacterial/fungal affliction, and the stewardship of a novice muzungu, one of my East African tomato plants had managed to get some tomatoes to the finish line, with (fingers crossed) a few dozen more on the way.

Richard, one of the friendliest men in Gulu.

As I was watering the plants, Richard, one of the compound guards and my agricultural consultant, came over to point out the tomatoes (he has a habit of seeing things in the garden before I do). He was happy for me that some of the tomatoes made it, though he wasn’t quite as blown away by the accomplishment, as he’s been digging since he was a child. I picked one and offered it to him but he said the first one has to go to me. I thanked him for all his help along the way and took my tomatoes into the house to ripen them in a paper bag. Later, when I laid them out to take a picture for this here blog, he came over and laughed with Vicki, saying I was “the happiest man in the world.”

Here’s the timely holiday revelation: Thanksgiving commemorates generous indigenous people sharing local resources and knowledge (specifically of an agricultural nature) with hopelessly destitute white people. As it looks like my tomato plants may ultimately survive a good deal of mismanagement on my part, due to timely interventions and advice on Richard’s part, I am once again struck by what a privilege it is to be here in Uganda and specifically in Gulu, where the Acholi people’s generosity of spirit is evident on a daily basis.

Batman now wears a cone of shame to save her from herself.

She is a proud beast but has nonetheless submitted to the authority of the cone.

Vicki took a morbid interest in the procedures. I guess you could call it a professional interest. But I refused to watch. She is clearly having more fun here than Moses the cat.

First harvest.

They don’t look like much from a distance but they are slowly but steadily producing some tomatoes.