Friday, July 19, 2013

Dog Shelter In Mexico Update

In the last post, I talked about balance. Hmmm... Right now the scale is tipped way over toward dog rescue. Here's an update on how things are coming along with the shelter. If you want to read about each stage in more depth, I'll provide the appropriate links to the shelter blog, Friends of RCA Colima.


click to see lots of before photos 
I rented an abandoned house. It's large and excellent for our purposes, and the owner is installing light and water.

click here to see all the clean-up action
Next step was to clean the floors. A whole crew of volunteers worked all last Sunday and cleared out three years of debris. Then the concrete floors were hosed down and scrubbed with soapy water. A lovely neighbor let us hook up hoses to her house, since our water wasn't hooked up yet.

click here for photos of the installation process
We got electricity! Yeah! Now we can work later into the evening.


This afternoon we will finish cleaning bat guano off the walls. Our team of young neighbor helpers is awesome, and keeps growing.

Click to go to the Facebook album with more photos of planting the gardens.
A neighbor offered us plants, and last night we cleaned out the weeds and put in a lovely garden in front of the refugio. As we worked, more and more neighbors gathered to help. I love Mexico!

click for dog pen instructions
In the meantime, we are working on building dog pens in my garage. Whew! It's a LOT of work but also saves a ton of money, which is in short supply. Complete step-by-step instructions for building a 1 meter by 1 meter pen are here. The cost for a pen (no roof) is about $25.

We are also filing the necessary papers with the city. We will be the first legal in-city shelter in Colima, complete with inspections, etc. We're compiling a resource notebook for the shelter in English, and Marissa will be translating the relevant parts into Spanish over time. Looks like our Spanish language shelter resource guide will be a first for Mexico. Woohoo!

If you would like to contribute to Refugio Cachorros y Abuelitos (Safe Haven for Puppies and Good Old Dogs), you can do so through Friends of PATA. They are a US non-profit set up to collect contributions for Mexican animal rescue organizations. Just specify that your donation is for RCA Colima, or put my name, Mary Carol Moran. If you live in the US, the donation is tax-deductible.

Thanks, everyone, for following along on our adventures! Giant world group hug!

Here are some other posts about our animal adventures.






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