I get emotional every time I read about someone who died of rabies.
It reminds me of God’s indescribable grace towards me. A British tourist was reportedly scratched by a stray puppy in Morocco, and she contracted rabies and died. It took me back to my childhood, where as a wayward young girl, I was bitten – twice – by rabid dogs and lived to tell the story.
I can never forget my mother’s anger the first time it happened; we had lied to her for months that we were going to the nearby Catholic parish for mass, but instead trotted two kilometres away to the Redeemed Church on Gaddafi road, for Sunday school, and where the seeds of my Pentecostal journey were sown.
Our parents approached parenting in a laissez-faire way, unlike today’s helicopter parenting. She would trust us – I was about eight – on our own to and from church. On the fateful day, a stray dog bit me, and as my sisters and I sat there crying, a Good Samaritan offered to drive us home.
When he told my widowed mother where he had found us, she was flabbergasted. And like that generation of parents, there was no coddling – dog bite or no dog bite. The bamboo cane came out and she gave us all a thorough beating, before getting me onto a taxi to Entebbe hospital for an anti-rabies shot and treatment.
We were told to watch if the offending dog would die within three days – the sign that it had rabies – and indeed when mum checked at the motor garage it reportedly slept at, the dog had died. I never caught rabies.
Only for another dog in Kawempe Ttula to bite me two years later, and it too died within three days, yet here I am. Don’t take God’s grace for granted. What you call ‘simple mistakes’ have actually cost others their lives.
The risks you take with your life and somehow pull through? Someone elsewhere was not so lucky. Be humble. Be grateful. Everyone who knows my dog escapades expects me to fear and hate dogs, but I actually love dogs. Maybe a sixth sense in me has decided that my death will never be as a result of a dog-anything. So, help me God.
