the diary of a traveling dreadhead: Nikki & Nacho

About a year and a half ago – long before I was even hoping my dreams of visiting Kopila Valley would ever come true – someone at Kopila decided taking care of 43 children just wasn’t enough. So they bought two German Shepherd puppies from Kathmandu and named the girl Nikki and the boy Nacho. When I arrived in January, Nikki and Nacho were still technically puppies but their size would make you guess otherwise. I would venture to say Nacho is 80 now pounds of pure muscle and Nikki, a little shorter, must be a few pounds shy of that. To give you a sense of their strength, they ripped a chain-link leash in half. Twice.

They are truly two of the most beautiful German Shepherds I have ever seen (behind Marley of course) and are definitely the most attractive dogs in Surkhet – the street dogs aren’t much competition. They protect the hostel all day and night. Well, for a few weeks, Nacho was sneaking up to the roof of the hostel and howling at the moon until sunrise, so he and Nikki got transferred to night patrol duty at the school instead. You’d be dinner if you tried to break into Kopila Valley School on Nacho’s watch.

Constantly being around children ages 3-17 has really made N&N very sweet when it comes to human interaction. Tail tugging, back riding, lip lifting, whisker pulling, ear folding, paw tickling, toy teasing, you name it the kids do it to the dogs. I feel like if it were any other big dog, we would have a bunch of kids missing hands and a few even missing heads – Nikki and Nacho are just so relaxed and let the kids do whatever they want to them.

N&N are pals. They run back and forth throughout the compound and pretend bite and pin each other all day – however sometimes I don’t think Nacho is really pretending. He is actually quite aggressive with other animals, and we found this out the hard way. We were taking Nikki and Nacho to the school (a short 90 second walk from the hostel), and along the way, Nacho saw a goat tied up in someone’s front lawn. There was no contemplation; he knew exactly what to do. Seconds later we were prying Nacho off the neighbor’s goat. The goat was lucky – he only lost a little bit of blood from where Nacho bit his ear. We weren’t so lucky. For our dog’s little snack, we had to give the neighbor 8000 Rupees ($80) and buy the goat from her. The offering price and the transaction happened so quickly and without thought, it made me think “Is it a Nepali custom that you have to buy a goat if your dog bites its ear? Kinda like you break it, you buy it? And is it always 8000 Rupees?!” All I know is that goat lived a nice couple months on our new land up in the hills, and then provided sustenance for all of Kopila Valley last Saturday night – and they have Nacho to thank for that delicious meal. A few weeks after the goat incident, Nacho plowed through the bamboo fence that encloses our side yard and mutilated a piglet. We now have a metal fence and Nacho’s heavy-duty runner is attached to a steel rod cemented in the ground to prevent further problems with our neighbors.

Of course, Nacho went through the typical male dog mounting stage a few months ago. When I returned to Kopila a few weeks ago, of course, Nikki was very pregnant and then gave birth a few days later to 5 adorable little German Shepherd rascals. The puppies truly make my day! They just learned how to open their eyes and a few of them are working on this awesome puppy army crawl in preparation for learning how to use their limbs. All they really do is squeal and climb on each other and roll around and drink milk but I could watch them for hours. Who knows what we will do with 5 German Shepherd puppies?! I can only think of one family in Surkhet that has the (wo)man-power and money to take care of a pure-bred German Shepherd puppy –- and that family already has 48 children and the puppies’ parents to take care of.