Tuesday, June 5, 2012

A Key, a Monk, and a Kitten


In March, I spayed/neutered 17 cats in the Christian Quarter on Muristan road, and have been feeding them lots of dry cat-food almost every day for nearly a year.   This past Sunday (June 3)  a sick kitten and 2 dead siblings appeared there which I could not reach, as the area is locked behind bars and a locked door.  To get in, there are 2 possibilities:

1. Contacting the Christian Arab St. John's Eye Hospital in another neighborhood which owns this property, and they send a guy to unlock the padlocked bars.  Both the administrator and the guy with the keys hate me because they think that my feeding the cats increases their numbers, whereas I have actually controlled the numbers at great expense in time, energy, and money, so they should be kissing my feet.

2.  Knocking on a big black metal door, behind which lives an ogre named Imad.  Imad once spent time in jail because he got into an argument with his beloved brother over a shirt and hit his brother over the head with a piece of wood, killing him.  Imad and I have had several spats, as he harasses and curses me when I feed the cats (which is very surreptitiously late at night or before 6 AM, but even so, twice he happened to be there).   In fact, 2 Sundays ago, he was there at 6 AM as I was intending to sneak food to the cats, and he pronounced a particularly juicy curse.  I grabbed a paper cup from a garbage pile that had the muddy remains of Turkish coffee and snarled "Say it again!  Say it again!", threatening to throw it on his clean sky-blue Sunday morning church shirt and grey suit.  Alarmed, he said, "Go in peace, sister! Go in peace, sister!"   Anyway, if I knocked on his door to ask permission to enter the garden to rescue the kitten, he no doubt would have refused, just to be sadistic.  

Here is the area:


I  went over there anyway Sunday morning (after calling the eye hospital, but they are closed on Sundays), but Imad wasn't home.  I went back at 6 PM.  On the way, I saw a Bedouin shop-keeper  (Nile) who I am friendly with, and told him the problem.  (He actually gave to me the scarf that I'm wearing in the above video as a free gift for helping cats!)  He immediately came with me, saying that even though Imad is crazy, he is on good terms with him, and would deal with him so I could rescue the kitten.  

Anyway, Imad wasn't home again, but suddenly, a Greek Orthodox monk with a key entered the big black door to Imad's place, and Nile got all excited and just before the door shut behind the monk, he asked permission for me to slip in to rescue the kitten.  Whisk!  The kitten was in my carrier in no time, and home in my bathroom.  I told Nile he was my hero.

Here's the kitten on You Tube:



Here is the kitten after 2 days of AD Hills, water, a little medicine, and petting........

Anyone want to adopt her?