The First Stage: Arrival
It's been almost a year now that we have moved to Croatia, a year that feels like several lifetimes condensed into one. A chaotic & challenging year to say the least, never have I struggled so much in my entire Life. At times the feeling was like living as a soldier in the frontline trenches.
We arrived here full of optimism that we might turn this place into a Bee Sanctuary. beloved KPHI, myself & Brownie the Labrador (at the time 15 years old) set foot on this property initially. We got thrown out of our Home, which left us little possibility other than to find an affordable place where we could care for Brownie during his final months, who was incontinent and losing his ability to walk, (literally a few days into our arrival he was completely lame, could not stand on his own even if helped)
The first month we were busy with concluding the purchase of the house, running to and fro, getting notary papers done, utilities changed to my name,registering for the garbage disposal (the old owner lived without it somehow, just ridding himself of it in public waste sites....)
The Property & House
The House was liveable but the costs kept adding up, we cleaned out the house of a lot of mess though & also removed a ton of garbage that was littering the garden. We had hoped we might get a little bit of support through donations, but as summer approached our funds were drying up, the few donations we received was just enough to survive.
We decided to stick it out, Brownie at 15 years old was incontinent and unable to walk, he needed 24/7 care, taking a job other than remote online work was impossible given our circumstances. We earned a tiny bit of money doing the odd online job, but also by selling the pellet oven already in the house & eventually got a decent amount in, after managing to sell the 2nd car we drove to Croatia with, enough to cover a few months.
The Follies of a Heart
In our folly despite our struggles we adopted 2 kittens from an acquaintance & thank god managed to reunite with Kali, KPHI's dog that had been stuck in Algeria for the last 3 years due to the whole Covid lockdowns. We hadn't had much left, but we were starting to hear red-flag raising comments from the people who were taking care of her, and I just told KPHI that she should risk the travel and bring her back, we'd manage somehow, we had just sold the pellet oven then, and it felt like this was the moment in which it would be possible to retrieve her.
Brownie with Bastet
Sekhmet & Bastet
First Pictures of Kali in Algeria taken by KPHI as she travelled to reunite with her, she was absolutely malnourished weighing only 14 Kilo's, healthy weight should have been at least 17, this is her in Algeria
KPHI & Kali in the Airport in Algeria, making their way back home to me in Croatia
On one of our vet visits with Kali to the local veterinary/shelter, we also adopted 2 puppies from a huge litter of 10, the mother was a stray that they picked up just after she had given birth to that huge litter.
Financially we were already in survival mode, but something in us did not hesitate at all when we saw those puppies. Despite the hardships we were going through and the exhaustion from taking care of Brownie, daily changing his diapers, changing his bedding & catching his poop when he began evacuating, some part of us took on also taking care of 3 other Dogs, Kali in treatment for TVT and parasitic diseases she caught in Algeria & 2 Kittens (Bastet & Sekhmet) & 2 Puppies (Kymia & Anubis).
Kymia & Brownie
Anubis, the brother of Kymia
Kymia, the sister of Anubis
Things turned dramatic mid-summer when one of the Kittens (Bastet) started displaying signs of being sick, she had always had a mild cough, but the veterinary shrugged it off as being inconsequential initially.
2 weeks before she passed I took her one more time to the vet, who told me that I should return in 2 weeks, but still shrugged it off as nothing serious.
2 days before the end of those 2 weeks, she started severely going downhill. The Lady who we had gotten the kittens from, visited on that Day and she already mentioned that she feared it might be FIP (Feline infectious peritonitis) which is fatal in most cases.
I took her into the Vet precisely on the day after, exactly 2 weeks since the last visit, the veterinarian just told me that her entire body was shutting down and there was nothing to do other than put her to sleep. I should have brought her in earlier and they might have been able to help her was her statement, I had brought her in twice & on her first visit where we mentioned the coughs, they had just shrugged it off & 2 weeks earlier where again they didn't think it to be anything serious. I was dumbstruck by that comment, I felt like she was talking to me as if she had never seen me drop by with that Kitten before. I left the vet with the euthanised body of a most precious Kitten, she had been in our life for such a short period of time but the love & joy she shared with us was beyond what I could have ever imagined receiving from a cat.
Already at this stage we were growing exhausted of Croatia, it felt like a place not suited to animals, since already with Kali we were becoming ever more aware of how incompetent they (the vets here) seemed to be. She was spayed since the tumor that was growing out of her vagina was misdiagnosed as a prolapse, so in her fragile state, they just removed all of her reproductive organs, just to inform us after the operation that she didn't have a prolapse but actually a tumor, which the spaying would have no effect on.
Kali , Kymia & Anubis with Sekhmet ready to go on a walk together (yes Sekhmet actually was able to walk on a leash with the pack of dogs)at this stage Bastet had already passed away, Brownie was sleeping just outside of the Picture's Frame, a short hour alone was the most we could leave him in his state, but it gave him a little rest not to be surrounded by the wild puppies for a short time so we took them all on walks occasionally
We felt like we were slowly entering into a strange horror movie. Our garden became progressively more inhospitable in the summer, scorching hot with a plague of mosquitoes unlike anything I've ever witnessed in my Life before, at any given moment being outside one would have at least 10 to more accurately 20-30 feeding on one simultaenously, Insect repellants did not work on them either, we had to abandon the garden & literally retreat indoors for the majority of the time. Apparently we had arrived in a year where the number of mosquito was in plague like proportions, such that our village and surrounding villages were sprayed on repeated occasions by a government-car that just covered the whole neighborhood in large fumes of toxic pesticide. The effect only lasted 2 days after spraying, on the third day the mosquito populations had already recovered to the same intensity as before the spraying. I have been to many places across the world in my childhood that were notorious for mosquitoes, but never in my Life had I witnessed anything of this magnitude, it was a true plague of biblical proportions.
So to sum up, this post describes the time of our Arrival in April 2023 up to the End of August 2023.
A descent into the Trenches of Life, whose peak was still to come.
The final half literally made us come to our senses and decide that we rather abandon this miserable place we had landed in & to try our luck on the Road. But more on that later.
Written by Shahanshah Artin , AEK