While our neighbor Semoko is visiting his mother in Labasa for a few days, we are looking after his puppy. Not that the puppy doesn’t spend at least half her time up here with us anyway. The fact that we lavish her with attention and Deborah feeds her constantly may have something to do with her frequent visits. Today we walked to town and Bone-zo (my phonetic spelling of Semoko’s pronunciation) tried to follow us. Usually she stops at the end of the long driveway from her house, or is scared back by the barking of the neighborhood dogs. But this time the barkers were all inside or napping and she just kept following us down the hill. There’s no way she would survive an untethered trip through town without being hit by a car or scared off into the bush, never to be seen again. A leash would have helped but we’ve yet to see a dog on a leash in all of Fiji. Deborah tried to fashion one from her walking stick by inverting it and using the strap handle around the dog’s neck, but it just looked like she was trying to wrangle a snake. So eventually I had to walk Bone-zo back to her house and tie her up with some rope I found in Semoko’s yard.
We continued our walk into town to have our laundry done, do a bit of shopping, and have a belated Valentine’s Day lunch (remember, we’re a day earlier here compared to the US) at a newly opened restaurant by the bay. We had time to kill while waiting for our laundry so we walked along a stretch of beach that proved to be quite good for shell collecting. We also stopped at the grocery store to pick up some boney sections of lamb neck for the puppy. We called Ali again to taxi us back up the hill to the house. If Bone-zo was unhappy about being tied up, she quickly forgave us when we handed her the neck bones.
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Lunch by the bay
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School kids in their uniforms walking home
Our haul of shells and coral
"Thanks for the neck bones, Mom!"
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