It’s an amazing fact of life. People and dogs eat food with the continual knowledge that they will have to eat again soon. Thinking on such things will only land someone in the book of Ecclesiastes asking, why! Part of our role as support for the team in the bush requires dogs. I’m sure if we were sledding in the Alaskan wilderness they would have a different purpose but here in the town of Madang they are for security. Papua New Guinea has a continual reputation for thieves (or rascals as they call them here). The simplest way to address this is with guard dogs. At the present time we have one adult and five puppies at our house. Soon we will give some of the puppies away and only have three dogs total.
With dogs comes the need to feed them and as I said above they just keep eating… After going to town and looking at the price of dry dog food we realized we would have to spend a large portion of money each much to sustain this. Thankfully we are not the first people to discover this issue and I talked with some friends at SIL about this. All the meat markets in town sell saw-dust meat (all the meat droppings that fall to the floor when meat is cut each day). This meat is sold for less than $.70 per pound and sometimes given away for free. Lorie and I have been cooking rice, adding some local greens and mixing it with the meat. I then pack these into patties and freeze them for later! The dog’s love them and the price is next to nothing.
Who would have thought making dog food from scratch would somehow have to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ going to the people of PNG?
Gospel passage to think on:
Galatians 1:1-3 “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore. Amen”.
Love the blog… I will have to keep up on these. Good to hear from you Mr. Lehman