I opened the front door to another sunny Kenyan morning. I jammed my dirt-encrusted feet into my flip-flops and shuffled to our outdoor drop. Kenyan mamas were lined up outside the dispensary and their wide-eyed babies watched me just like they did every morning as I walked past the sugarcane, around the banana tree, over the fire pit … and almost stepped on a medium-sized dog. It was an ordinary Kenyan dog—mangy, dirty, thin—but it didn’t run away like most of them did. “Are you seeking refuge down here?” The wandering eyes peeked up at me from under a thick set of doggy eyebrows. “Good luck with that,” I muttered as I closed the door to the choo behind me. I scrubbed laundry while my husband, Cory, burned garbage in the fire pit—daily chores we’d become accustomed to in our six months since moving to the country. He dumped the remains of food scraps we’d gathered over the past few days on top of the paper pieces and bits of floor fuzz we’d swept up. “Get out of there!” Cory hissed. The dog had returned to salvage the rot-stricken food from the burning coals. Cory swatted at him with a stick. “Don’t hit him!” I flinched at the prospect of my husband—one of the most compassionate people I’d ever met—becoming so comfortable with local custom. “I don’t want him to burn himself,” he said. We watched the dog, which was crouched among broken banana tree leaves licking a wrapper pulled…
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