First the good news:

We have been looking for screen doors for the cabana since we got here.  We checked the Home Depot in Mayaguez and they simply don’t sell them.  They don’t sell the aluminum frames to make them either.  We had heard that there are people who will make them but we just hadn’t either taken the time to find them or they were hard to find.  Not sure which.

One day when we were traveling up to our friends house in Pico Atalya and we passed Rincón Aluminum Works.   We stopped in and asked about screen doors and they asked us for our phone number in return.  Well we don’t have a phone.  This makes it a little more difficult for things like appointments.  We gave them our directions and crossed our fingers that they would find us.  We didn’t see them on the day we figured they would be around so we stopped back by on another day.  They hopped in a truck and met us at the house!  Measurements were taken and we gave them a deposit.

Well today they showed up for the installation!  I am not really used to watching while someone else works, which is sometimes nice and refreshing.  Especially after our whirlwind of sadness that occurred just a few days earlier (more on that below).

Installation of the Back Door

New Screen Doors Installed!

Now for the bad news…. The other day early in the morning we found 2 of our neighbors dogs in the yard.  At first we thought a dog was just giving the little turkeys a hard time in their cage, then we saw a dead rooster and another of their dogs running about.  We later came to find a total of 4 of our birds had been killed.

Roosty Under a small Tree

It was hard to wake up to this and has been another life lesson.  Life and death is something that we seem to encounter more directly and more often with our new life here than we ever were back in the suburban life we had in Colorado.  We often have conversations about what it feels like to see death because it usually is hidden.  This is why when I brought the dogs back to their owner I also carried along the carcass of a dead chicken;  Trying to emphasize and share what his lack of responsibility had caused, and that there are implications that we had to deal with even if he didn’t.  What makes it more difficult is that we are friends with dogs owner and that adds a lot of complications to the matter.

Another interesting thing we have noticed is that generally speaking, people don’t seem to care about a chicken.  We found this out when we petitioned the city of Greeley trying to allow people to have a small flock of backyard chickens.  The attitudes towards these animals by the general population is so radically different than that of dogs and cats.  Chickens aren’t on what I call the “love list”.

We have chickens not only as a source of food (eggs) but we also enjoy watching them and raising them from chicks and as pets, so it should be no surprise that when they are killed, it hurts.  The only similar thing we can liken this to is to imagine that your dog, or dogs, were brutally killed by another persons animal.  If this had happened the outpour of sympathy would be apparent!  When you tell someone that 4 of your chickens died, it’s like “Oh….and??”.   Even from the organization who was in charge of fostering the animal that killed them gave a similar response.  Aren’t they supposed to be animal lovers?

I suppose there is a love list and an order of priority with worms somewhere at the bottom and human children at the top.  The children of ones own country being above all other countries.  I’ve noticed this pattern before and see it yet again.

Needless to say we are really on guard for dogs as potential threats to our chickens and they are once again locked inside the coop.  We had done this for the hawks, but the chickens had grown to a size where the hawks ‘were no longer an issue.  It is hard and disheartening and takes a lot of momentum away from us to have setbacks like this.  Discouraged and deflated for a few days questioning what we were doing and trying to achieve.

So the screen doors gave us a renewed sense that all is not lost, there will be ups and downs and try to know that we need to accept the things we cannot change, have the courage to change the things we can and have the wisdom to understand the difference.