I Present You Max

No, not another stray. Jack turns out to be a Max. `The stray we found in Hamana last week has been reunited with its owner; a rather distraught girl, who was so heartbroken over the loss of her dog that her father couldn’t handle it anymore and bought her a new dog. Now they have two.

Why not wait a while, you think? Well, when they found out their dog was missing last Saturday, they went to the local police station. Remember, the police man cooking potatoes?

The dog belongs to the girl on the left

Yes, the policeman told them, there had indeed been a lady with a dog passing by, and yes, he looked just like the dog they had lost. And she had taken the dog down with her to Beirut. “Let me look for the phone number,” said the police man. And then it turned out they had noted down my number incorrectly, or had lost it. And so their dog was gone. Forever. Taken by someone to Beirut, a city of some 1 million people. 

There’s not a lot of things we ask from our local police. We do not really expect them to organize traffic, to catch thieves or to solve political murders.  ‘Wasta’ is more powerful than the law, and so you cannot blame them for having their hands tied. But could we at least try and copy a phone number correctly?

So the number didn’t work. Well, had they bothered to make a copy of my ID, asked the father of the girl. No sir. Did you think of noting down the license of the car? No sir, but it was a black truck. The dad raised hell. The dog had been found, but was lost again.

To make a long story short, through some sleuth work from both sides (police not included) this morning Max (aka Jack) was reunited with his owner.

I love a happy ending.