I give you “Childhood Stories, part 1”
PETS
Leah: When I was a little girl, probably in about first or second grade we had rats in our classroom at school. They were fascinating! Each child got a chance to take the furry creatures home for the weekend if your parents would allow. If my memory serves me correctly, I did bring them home at least once. My brother also loved the rats! We played with them non-stop. Of course this led to a conversation that began with, “Please Dad!!” You can hear where this is going, right? “Can we please get our own rats??” I distinctly remember my Dad laughing aloud. “I don’t think so! There is no way you are having rats! Plus, I’m going to be the one to clean their cage.” “We promise we’ll clean the cage!!!” So, in a matter of a few weeks, we brought home our very own rats, Snickers and Freckles. They were gray, I think. Snickers was my rat, she was named after Snickerdoodle cookies. My brother’s rat was Freckles. She (I think they were both girls?) was named this because his best friend had also recently got a rat named Freckles.
After only a few short weeks, my Dad really opened up to the rats and was secretly happy that we had gotten them. He was working from home during that time and I remember so plainly that every morning he would wake up, bring the rats to his office desk and let them run around for hours. In the evenings, we would also let them run around our living room. We would just open the cage and let them free for sometimes days at a time. If they wouldn’t return to their cage by the end of the evening, we would just leave the cage open and trust they’d eventually find their way back. And they always did. Unfortunately though, they destroyed our couches and sometimes ate our homework. It was comical, actually! I’d be lying on the floor in front of the TV doing my schoolwork and GONE. My paper would disappear under the couch just like that.
My brother, David, and I had a total of six rats. After the first two died, we got another two, and finally another two. We loved those rats; they were really fun and totally entertaining! Oh, and by the way, I don’t think we ever cleaned the cage even once.
Piet: I grew up in what is referred to as an informal settlement. My house was made of bricks and tin and was VERY cold during the winter. There were several holes in the walls which would allow cold air and other unwanted things in.
I grew up with my younger brother, Ernest. We shared a bed and I remember he took up most of the bed in the way he was sleeping.
Rats were not pets. They were enemies. The first time I heard that Leah had rats as pets I thought she was crazy!! In the middle of the night, we could hear the rats running around our house. They would jump on our bed and chase each other across our chests. Then we would hear them banging around the pots trying to steal food. We didn’t have cupboards, so veggies would be left out in the veggie rack. The rats knew exactly where they were kept and they would get huge after a while from eating so much of our food. If we weren’t careful and left our feet uncovered at night, they would bite our toes! This happened on a few occasions. Also, sometimes you would go to bed with a complete set of socks and undies and in the morning you would find holes chewed through them! I’m sure this was mostly because they stank! :-) Eventually they just started living in our house, not by our choice of course.
I did have “normal” pets growing up. I had a dog, a cat, a rabbit and some chickens. The intention of getting a cat was to get rid of the rats. I’m pretty sure that the cat was intimidated by the army of enormous rats, haha. We used to joke with my cousins that the rats were the size of the cat. And instead of the cat chasing the rats, the rats chased the cat. Of course desperate times call for desperate measures and we ate our pet rabbit for the meat. No, not bunny chow (South African joke!). Same with some of the chickens. My dog was named Seekie. He was a bit scraggly and had lice, but he was my friend. My grandmother, whom I lived with, wouldn’t allow Seekie to sleep with me, but sometimes I snuck him in bed with me and he loved it too! Because we were poor, we didn’t buy dog food. No one did, actually. We just fed the dog scraps from our dinner or out of the garbage.
Pets in African culture are different than in the western culture. If a westerner would see the relationship between us and our animals, it may appear to be abuse, but this was the norm in our context of having limited resources. There was never a time when my dog slept hungry and he knew he was well loved.
…Stay tuned for more episodes of “Childhood Stories” :)