On the second week of the trip we all went to Dambulla to where Anura’s family live to help the animals up there. We had two minibuses and split into two groups most days. Dr Rohan came with us to help and it was nice to see different areas of Sri Lanka and meet new people. Jos and Anura did a brilliant job in organising everything and were such a big help to us on the trip.
The first day on our Dambulla trip we went up to Polonarawa to see Dr Fernando who Liz and other volunteers visited in December 2005 who has about 30 dogs and is a real character and animal lover. Unfortunately we could not go to her house to see her dogs because it is not safe at the moment. We met her at a local restaurant and treated all of the local strays around there and then went onto a small village and treated about 20 dogs. Sam very kindly gave Dr Fernando some money which she raised to pay for fencing to put up for her dogs.
On the way back to Dambulla we visited a slaughterhouse to invite them to our Kandy slaughterhouse conference, which they agreed and then carried on back to the hotel. On the way back we saw a big group of monkeys on the side of the road and further down a beautiful mother and baby monkey who were both dead. The traffic along the road is terrible and the drivers driver so fast so we assume that they were both hit by a vehicle. Many people stopped to look and see if they could help but we were all too late. The only thing we could do for them was to bury them in a nice place. It was quite a sad ending to a happy day.
One afternoon Janice, Liz, Dr Rohan, Anthony, Matthew and I were driving along near Dambulla and we saw a dog sitting on the side of the road with a big tumour on the side of left side of his face, just below his ear. His owner was away but the neighbours were looking after him and Dr Rohan said he could remove the tumour and they agreed. We set up an operating table in the back of their garden as we had all of the equipment and supplies in the back of the minibus and the tumour was successfully removed.
