MC Quixote

Raves at the Pound Part 34

I'd been working at the Humane Society for about two months before I met up with Sancho; maybe he smelled dog on me. I think it goes a lot deeper than that because I've come to find dogs are super sensitive creatures and they're smarter than most people think. Is it possible Sancho saw me and could sense that I was the type of person who would take him in? Who knows? But I do know this, never underestimate the power of a dog.

Back to how I started working at the pound; all the seniors at my school have to do a service project, which means 50 hours of volunteer work for a nonprofit organization. They give you a list of places at the beginning of senior year and I checked-out a couple of them before I decided on the Humane Society.

Why the Humane Society? It's kind of selfish, but I can relate with beings who don't have papers, and the Humane Society is one of the only places up here where there's some hope of getting papers. Sounds goofy, but something has to give me hope, and I move toward places where I find hope.

In some strange way, when I see a dog get papers it gives me hope. There's the hope that one-day, people without papers up here will be able to get them. There's also been this other unexpected hope that I didn't see coming; it has more to do with the transformation that happens to the people who adopt pets from the pound.

It's ironic, but what happens when person adopts a pet is something more liberating for the person adopting than for the being without papers. In a strange way the adoption process seems to open a person's heart and that seems to be one of the most liberating things a person can do.

I've seen it happen over and over and I'm so convinced of the power of this adoption ceremony that I'm starting to think the U.S. immigration policy would work better if there was a route to getting papers which involved some type of adoption/sponsorship program available for common everyday "Americans".

Hmmm, of course not everyone would get sponsored / adopted, just like at the pound. And why does my attention always go out to the unadopted. I can't stop thinking about the ones left behind, the unwanted, the unclaimed.

What do the unadopted get? They sit in a cage next to hundreds of others who are caged and listen to each other's cries in the night and in the day; knowing there's something quite horrific ahead. And there aren't many people who know how this horror gets worse at night, and all these beings never really sleep, and that's one of the cruelest things about papers.

So I volunteer most of my hours after the sun has gone down and I try to quiet the thing in my own head that stirs when it's dark. My head won't rest at night from the deep secret that my dad doesn't have papers. And yes, my volunteer work at the Humane Society is selfish in some ways, but what I've discovered is that my efforts do give some, who have little hope of papers, a little bit of comfort in the night; this has become my raves at the pound.

There's another unexpected perk of my volunteer work; getting to know Tammy. Tammy has been working for the Humane Society for the last 15 years. It's funny how she likes to talk to me in Spanish. I didn't really get it at first; she just said she wanted to practice her Spanish. She speaks Spanish pretty well and as I've gotten to know her, I found out why it's so good. She's been a part of a group of gueros who go into Mexico and then cross into the U.S. as if they're undocumented. They do this to try and understand what undocumented people go through, out of a strange kind of compassion. I didn't believe her when she first told me, but I looked it up online and found that these groups do exist. Just when I started to lose all hope, the pound has given my human spirit some refuge.