Incidents in the Life of a Cat Lady...in Africa

You would think that by doing something so exciting as moving to Africa and participating in this whole “Peace Corps” thing I pushed off the inevitable future I have as an Old Maid in her house with only her cats to serve as companions. Not so. I am a cat lady. It probably doesn’t matter that these cats aren’t my preferred companions. That doesn’t negate the fact that I talk to them all day long and that we frequently have very strongly worded one sided arguments on a weekly basis. Sometimes I even give them the silent treatment.

I inherited two cats from the previous volunteer and was actually pretty excited about getting pets. I’ve never had pets of my own as an adult and I thought we could be gal pals in my little African house (see what I mean about the inevitability of Old Maid-dom?). They really are adorable cats, especially for this country. Most of the cats here are real sickly and mangy looking. You would think that fact would keep people from killing and eating them. But it doesn’t. My cats are getting fatter by the day. They constantly harass me for food even though I feed them regularly and they supplement that with mice and lizards that they catch and I recently found out that they go to my neighbors house and bed for food as well. I’ve learned to tune out a lot of animal noises here, including the sound of a lizard skull being crushed by a cats jaw under my bed while I’m trying to sleep.

My first night at post my cats scared the shit out of me. I was already a little nervous being in a new place surrounded by strangers and also certain that I was going to die in my sleep because I had electrocuted myself earlier in the day. How’s that for your first day in an African village? I tried to plug something into my converter and accidentally touched the prongs with my middle and index finger and nearly killed myself. I couldn’t get the thing off my hand for about 5 seconds. During which I had time to consider the fact that it was going to be real pitiful to have died on my first day in village from electrocution among the million other things that could kill me in this country. I also made a strangled animal-like noise that I’m certain everyone in my concession could hear. This fact explains what I did immediately after I got the thing off my hand. I went straight to my shelf and pulled out my dictionary to figure out how to say, “I electrocuted myself!!!” in French. I think I was in shock. My fingers were burning and tingling and I was shaking all over. My next reaction was to call two other volunteers to let them know why I would be found dead and being eaten by my cats in a few days. Finally, I sat down and put my hand in cold water and searched my PC health book for what to do if you seriously shock yourself. So you can understand (please understand?) why I was a little unsettled that night as I went to bed. On top of that, I am taking an anti-malaria drug called Larium that gives you crazy dreams. I woke up at like 3 AM from a really weird Larium dream to the sound of animal cries above my bed. In my half sleep state I could only explain these noises as coming from some terrifying bush creature that had found its way into my house. I grabbed my phone and used the screen to illuminate the area above my bed only to find my two cats on top of my mosquito net staring down and me and crying. It was a special first night.

The cats have also caused me a certain amount of embarrassment in my concession. I heard that you could get cat food in a magic store called Erevan in Cotonou, so, on a trip to the city, I stopped in the store to buy some. The sign next to the bags of cat food said “Cat Food’ and there was a cat on the front, so I figured it was a safe bet and grabbed it. This was the first time I had been in anything resembling an American store since coming here and I was just too dazzled by everything to pay much attention to any one thing at a time. It’s amazing how quickly you lose your ability to deal with overwhelming varieties of things that you can find in America. In my village I can literally fit on a post it note all the things I could buy at the market. That’s because the only food I can get in my village is as follows: onions, tomatoes, garlic, peppers, eggs, soy cheese, fish, some obscure type of leafy vegetable used here to make a sauce, yams, bananas, rice, noodles, bread, and oranges. There may be some other random things, but I don’t eat those things. Anyways, this store in Cotonou confused me greatly. I stood in the aisle with air fresheners for at least 20 minutes and there were like 5 options. Anyways, I bought the cat food and air freshener and then escaped from the store as quickly as possible. I lugged the bag of cat food home in a taxi and on a zem and was greeted by my neighbors who had apparently missed me. As I was talking to them about my trip my cats were at my ankles bothering me for food so I grabbed the bag of cat food and poured it into their bowl while my neighbors watched. What came out of the bag at first baffled me. It was little pellets of grey stuff. I took a look at the bag again and realized that the cat on the front was indeed frolicking in a litter box, not poking around at its food in a bowl. I had bought cat litter. I tried to explain to my neighbors what it was but they just could not comprehend that a human being would ever spend money on something for cats to go to the bathroom on. I could see their point. It was an epic fail.

Soon after this little debacle, the cats and I got into a bit of a tiff over some soy cheese. Soy cheese, or ‘soja’ has become one of my favorite foods here. Every time I buy it at the market I have my own little Iron Chef competition to top my previous efforts to come up with new ways to incorporate it into my meals. I am basically a vegetarian in my village. I don’t like eating the fish they sell here very much and since I don’t relish the thought of buying a live goat or chicken on market day, leading it home on a rope, slaughtering it in my front yard, and preparing it, I don’t eat much meat. Soy cheese is a good source of protein and it is delicious, so win-win-win! Anyways, one day I brought home some soy cheese and left it on the table while I went to greet my neighbor. When I came back in the house my cats were ripping my soy cheese apart on the kitchen floor. I decided they needed to spend some time outside to learn a lesson mostly because my only other reaction was to give them to a villager and tell them and eat the cats as payment for my lost soy cheese. (Please keep in mind that I can only get soy cheese once a week and it’s my main/favorite addition to my primarily rice diet)The only problem with my “time out” plan was that the cats had recently eaten a perfectly cat sized hole in my screen doors so that they could come and go as they pleased. I solved this by grabbing a big piece of cardboard and taping it across the hole so they couldn’t get in. This seemed to enrage them. Instead of disappearing into the foliage behind my house like I had hoped. They staked out the 2 inch piece of screen below the cardboard, pressed their faces to it, and cried nonstop for hours on end. Just when I was ready to spray them in the face through the screen with insecticide to teach them another lesson, they eerily quieted down and disappeared. Twenty minutes later, I realized that this was only an attempt on their part to regroup and plan a new strategy to get back into the house. I was sitting on my couch reading when I heard a funny scratching noise from the back door. I looked over and the cats were using their paws as human-like hands to lift the cardboard off the screen and shove their deceptively cute faces underneath it and through the hole in the screen. It was that moment that I realized that these cats have been surviving in a culture that sees them as food and probably fighting off pythons as well as hungry children in their free time and that there was no way I was going to defeat them on their turf. Cats 1- Me 0.