Fall 2012/Winter 2013 Aesculapian Magazine - University of ...

ever have so few
“Ndone so much with
so little.” I remember those
words being spoken to me,
and my two fellow linguists
in my unit in Baghdad, in
February of 2005. We were
about to leave, and the
brigade commander came to
thank us personally for our
efforts.
Moments like that stay with
you, and they snowball. In my
case, it gave me an incredible
amount of confidence in the
difference that one person
(or three) can make. I had
a notion that if I believed
enough in what I was doing
and was willing to work
hard enough, that nothing
was impossible. So last year,
when I decided that I wanted
to go to a Middle Eastern
country for an externship,
and chose Bahrain, the fact
that there was no externship
program, nor even any kind
of veterinary program in the
country, did not deter me. I
emailed, and emailed, and
emailed, and asked friends
who were in the country to
go check out the Bahrain
Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals (BSPCA).
And, I kept emailing until I
had secured the permission
of the BSPCA to let me travel
to Bahrain for my entire 12-
week summer vacation and
work with their veterinarian.
It was a brutally hot
summer, habitually reaching
above 120 degrees in the
afternoons. Air conditioning
brought the temperature in
the office or the surgery suite
down to a balmy 98 degrees
most days. While I was there,
I got to work with more than
500 animals, mostly dogs and
cats, which were brought into
the shelter by people from all
over the island. I wish I could
tell all 500 stories, because
Aesculapian Fall 2012/Winter 2013 18