“You told them WHAT? Keep their big dog for 6 months while they are on home assignment?” I responded as we were getting ready for bed that night back in early April 2015. “I told them I would need to talk to you first, to make sure you were okay with it, but I really think you’ll love her. She is a very sweet dog,” he patiently replied. This was the gist of the conversation Dan and I had one night after his return from Loiyangalani in northern Kenya, where he had just delivered supplies and stayed the night with the Woodworths who serve there. It was not the first time I had heard about Maya, their dog, but it was the first I heard of us volunteering to keep her for 6 months while they were away in the US on home assignment. He told me that he simply offered it for ‘one day…in the future’ and was completely surprised to hear them say they really needed someone to take her as they were leaving in 2 weeks. Having no idea their home assignment was upcoming when he made the offer, once it was made and they asked if he was serious, he told them yes, as long as his wife agreed.
Dan had flown to Loiyangalani several times before, bringing supplies to the Woodworths who were working there with The Master’s Mission. And he had told me many times about their big dog, Maya, who was ever so friendly. He would often stay the night when bringing in supplies to this very hot location near Lake Turkana and had told me how Maya would often come into his room at night and breathe her hot breath right in his face while he was sleeping. He appreciated her desire to greet him and her genuine friendliness, but the hot breath was a bit much in that extreme heat.
I think my biggest concern was that we had recently moved into the home we were in and we had a 7-month-old Beagle, Pickles, to consider. And he was a LOT of work as I managed the home, homeschooled our two youngest children and continually let him in and out, in what seemed like every 15 minutes of the day. It was also the beginning of rainy season which with a dog means one thing: MUDDY PAWS! Muddy paws from the dark red dirt turned mud here in Kenya. Muddy paws that need to be cleaned in a basin of water each time said dog goes outside and immediately wants to come back in to stay dry. And now my husband was suggesting that for the next 6 months we add another dog, a very large dog, to the muddy paw fray. There was also the problem of keeping her for 6 months, growing attached and then having to give her back to the Woodworths. How would I bring this dog into our home, only to fall in love with her (after all he kept repeating how sweet she was) and then give her back to them! I wasn’t sure I had it in me, even with his repeated reference to her sweetness, but I could tell by how he talked about her with that look in his eyes, that we were likely going to have a new addition to our family very soon. Now I just needed to mentally prepare for this big change…and help the children prepare as well!
After discussions together and then with the children, we finally decided it would be good to have her come and stay, and she arrived just about 2 weeks later, just before Sarah’s 16th birthday. Dan met the Woodworths in a grocery store parking lot to pick her up. He was concerned she might hesitate getting into the car with him, a near stranger, for the drive across town to our home, but much to his surprise, she said her goodbyes to her family and happily hopped up into the Land Cruiser. When he arrived home, I was not there. I’ll never forget driving up to our home that evening and having this HUGE dog come bounding down the driveway to greet me. Her head came up to my stomach, and her paws were huge. She had the droopy eyes and jowls of a St. Bernard but was reddish in coloring. And Dan was certainly right, she was friendly! Very BIG, and very friendly.
Upon her arrival, Pickles went into instant protest. He barked almost constantly at this HUGE dog that was now in the home with all of us, as if to say, “Hello…does anyone see that there is an intruder dog here in our home…a dog that is NOT part of this family! Hello…will somebody please make her leave!” After 10-15 minutes of him barking at her lying peacefully on the tile, she would reply with a HUGE, DEEP, heart-stopping bark. This would make each of our hearts practically stop, and temporarily stop Pickles from barking for possibly 5 minutes. After we had all recovered from the shock of her huge bark, Pickles would start in barking again to repeat the cycle. After almost a week of this I really thought we had made a mistake taking her. Would he continue to bark at her for the next 6 months? It was mayhem! And then, just as I had been concerned, there were the muddy paws.
About one week after her arrival, we decided to bring in topsoil to our yard to help the grass grow better. And then it started raining. And you can only imagine how muddy the paws of this 100 pound St. Bernard/Rottweiler mix dog got. You know when you bread chicken, dipping it in flour, then eggs, and then breadcrumbs, and you get those giant clumps of breading on your fingers? THIS was what Maya’s paws were like after just a couple of minutes walking outside. So, I would fill a basin with water, take each paw and put it in the water, rub the paw with my hand to remove the large clods of red dirt that had adhered to it, and remove it to the towel for drying. After all 4 paws were done individually, she could once again come inside, and hopefully I had removed all the red Kenyan dirt so as to not have it tracked throughout the house. Then, after changing the water in the basin, I would proceed with washing Pickles’ paws in the same fashion. This would be fine if they went out for most of the day and returned only in the evening, but they were in and out all day long! It wasn’t long after the topsoil arrived to our yard that I really regretted getting it.
Somehow, we made it through that rainy, muddy season though, and day by day, Maya worked her way into each of our hearts, including Pickles’. He finally stopped barking at her after a few weeks. It was then he realized that Maya was a lot of fun to play with. She would flip him onto his back, put her mouth gingerly on his neck, gently grab his leg with her mouth and pull him down, causing him to squeal every so often, but never once really hurting him. He was like a kid in the candy store, going back for more just minutes after she let him know she was done playing with her huge, deep bark. And even though she was usually the one to tell him play time was over, you could see that she liked playing with him as much as he liked playing with her. It brought out the ‘young dog’ in her.
It wasn’t only Pickles who loved being around Maya. She was sweet. Just as Dan had described her when he would return from a trip to the mission station. I often said that Maya was born with the demeanor and approach to life of “How can I make you happy?’ That’s how she lived her life. She was always delighted to see us when we came home or simply walked into the room where she was resting. She would often do what we called her ‘blocking maneuvers’ to get between Pickles and us when she wanted ‘some loves’ and felt Pickles was getting more than she. She loved to be petted and always wanted to be as close to us as possible for attention. This was great, except on Sunday mornings when we were all dressed up for church. We would come out one by one to go to the car and each one dance our way around her trying to avoid getting her wet St. Bernard jowls on our clean church clothes. She really meant no harm, but just wanted to be close for some lovin’. And then, sometimes when she got a bit too close it would happen. Her huge paw, with the 100+ lbs. of weight pressing down from her body, would come crunching down onto your bare sandaled toe. And boy did it hurt. But the minute you made any expression of pain from her stepping on you, she would feel so bad and try to make you feel better by coming close again for more lovin’, her whole-body wiggling sheepishly toward you. Even as she aged and found it really hard to get that big body up, when we would drive into the driveway, she would make the huge effort needed to get up from her resting spot nestled in the cool flower bed and amble over to see us.
After the allotted 6 months, we didn’t hear from the Woodworths. We were concerned, as they were planning to return to Kenya in October, but no word came from them. And while we were concerned, we were not sad for any extra days we got with her. We had told them before they left that we would keep her as long as they needed, but we wondered why they weren’t getting in touch with us. And honestly, by this point, I, and really the whole family, were so connected to her that we could not imagine giving her back to them. She had definitely worked her way into my heart, as well as the hearts of each of us in the family. It wasn’t long after the 6 months that Dan finally got word from her family. Jon explained that he had lost all of his contacts in his phone, and it had taken him a while to get our contact info again. He also shared that with changes in their mission organization, they had made the decision to stay in the states for a longer period than expected. They were honestly not even sure they would be coming back to Kenya at all. At this point, we offered to keep Maya indefinitely, to which Jon and their family agreed. We were delighted! The dreaded day of giving her back to them would now never come!!
When Maya came to us in April 2015, she was somewhere around 6 or 8 years old…they weren’t exactly sure. I guess that’s kind of how it goes with missionary dogs. We got to keep her as ours until her death September 23, 2019. Over those five and a half years, Maya brought our whole family a lot of love, as well as great protection! Her bark would scare anyone who didn’t know her away. In our old neighborhood, the kids from our Weekly Kids’ Bible Club got to know her and quickly realized how sweet she was despite her large size and impressive bark, but their parents were always quite cautious around her, and even concerned when the kids wanted to come over to visit her and pet her. And whenever the water or electric company sent an employee to come and read our meter, they would enter our yard with trepidation. No stranger would ever dare come into our yard with Maya there to protect us.
Maya had a zest for life! Whatever she did, she did it with everything she had. If we brought her a bone from the butcher, she ate it with joy and vigor, often devouring it in just a few mighty crunches of her jaws…and she especially loved it if we stayed by her side while she gobbled it up. At Christmas, when we brought home a goat to roast, she was right in there with Dan and Jon Michael as they did the slaughtering, waiting patiently in hopes of getting a bit of meat to enjoy. When she did, she ate it with joy!
She also loved to go out for walks, or perhaps they are better called strolls. She would proudly walk down the street on her leash with her head held high as the neighborhood dogs howled behind their gates. We always said that those dogs were her subjects, and she the Queen, sauntering on parade. Pickles, our Beagle LOVES to go running, and he will run as many miles as you set out for, never stopping until we are back at the house. He’s even wise to the tactic of taking him for part of the run and then going for another part without him. He just won’t have that as he will bark in protest throwing himself at the gate until you return! Maya, on the other hand, always started out super excited for the first few minutes of her stroll, trying to run like Pickles and setting out at a brisk trot…almost a canter. But then, after a short bit of light jogging with that hefty body of hers, she would slow to a walk and then quickly become ‘barn sour’, pulling us toward home! As the years went on, she still liked to go out for her strolls, and still always headed out briskly at first with a light jogging pace, but often she couldn’t make it farther than the end of the road before she was tired and ready to go home. Sometimes she might not even make it all the way home before lying down in the road in protest to anymore walking. Somehow, we would get her big body up and coax her to go though, and she’d make it back to the house, happy to have been out on parade with her people.
As Maya got older and less mobile, she spent more and more time sleeping in and amongst the flowers in the cool dirt of the flower beds. One of those places was right in front of our neighbors’ (with whom we share a home and yard) front stairs. Prior to Maya’s arrival, they had beautiful flowers blooming there, but the more she laid there, those flowers got uprooted from the weight of her large stature. But she loved the feel of the cool dirt on her hot fur in the Nairobi sun, so there she would happily lie. After her death, our neighbors, the Sharmas, bought a huge ceramic pot in which to plant some lotus flowers. The lotus flower grows in murky water, almost like a lily pad, blooming with beautiful purple flowers. They wanted something beautiful there where Maya often lay. They told me that in India, they say of the lotus flower that ‘out of the muck comes beauty’. So, even as Maya was no longer part of our lives, out of the ‘muck’ of her death, they wanted to have something grow there that was a beautiful reminder of sweet Maya. Such a thoughtful gesture by them.
Maya came to us unexpectedly and with some initial concerns, and though at first, I was doubtful, she quickly worked her way into my heart and the hearts of most who met her. She was so big with a heart stopping bark, she loved to go out with us for her strolls and light jogs, occasionally she’d crush my bare sandaled toe with her big paw, but mostly she was our sweet Maya Girl who taught us so much with her abounding unconditional love. She was always ready to give love, never expecting anything in return. She didn’t wait for you to love her first, she always wanted to give love to anyone who came nearby. Even when she could barely walk in her last days, her face would light up when we came to spend time with her, and her whole countenance would calm in the midst of her pain as she enjoyed time with us near her side. It was so hard to say goodbye to her that afternoon of September 23, 2019, with tears streaming down my face, but I’m so thankful for the opportunity to have her as our own for the five and a half years God blessed us with our sweet Maya Girl.
~Lesli
The Halvorson Family in Africa 