Stripe aka Bala

One morning mid- January I walk out of my room to find the cutest little puppy standing in my back yard staring at me. Now I’m not a dog person but this one was adorable. I wasn’t quite sure where she came from or why she was in my back yard but to be honest I wasn’t really surprised. Come on, we used to have a pet deer tied up back there.

Before long, my host mom came out to tell me she brought the puppy home with her from Trujillo (where she was on vacation). She said she got her to help “guardar la casa” (guard the house). Awww, a cute little puppy to scare away burgurlars. What a great idea.

As you can see, she’s got this white strip down her face so and she didn’t have a name so I took it upon myself to call her “Stripe”. I even made her a name tag, put it on her and took her out for a walk. I should have known better than to name her that, Peruvians can’t for the life of them say words that start with the letter “S”. When I told my host mom and dad her new name they tried to say it and it came out more like “Es- striip”.

Fast forward two weeks….. I get home from vacation and she’s got a new name – Bala. Spanish for “Bullet”. Seeing how she bounces around like crazy, I think its appropriate and much easier to say for that matter.

Bala likes to eat me. My hands, my feet, my toes, my clothes. And I wasn’t sure why, but I kept finding her in my dirty clothes bucket. I really didn’t understand what she wanted with it until Chip explained to me that puppies like to play with clothes that are really dirty and smell really bad because it reminds them of the people that wear them. Well, by the time my clothes are declared dirty enough to deserve a good hand washing, they definitely reek. And that awful smell reminds her of me? Yeah, that makes me feel real good.