A Year of Maggie and Mila: My Experience Having a Peace Corps Pet
- May 3, 2025
- 7 min read
If you were to have asked me at the start of my Peace Corps service whether or not I wanted a cat, I probably would have said no. On top of all the other cultural adjustments of moving to a new village and trying to integrate, learn a new language, and find my place, having a cat seemed like it would be overwhelming and single me out for spending my money in such a strange way, when I was already a strange foreigner as is.
In circumstances where animals are most often valued for their work utility (i.e. horses for transport or dogs for security) or for their ability to produce foodstuffs (i.e. meat, dairy, or eggs), having a pet purely for companionship can be a privilege. In order to take care of a pet, you must have the disposable income to feed it, and dedicate the energy to train and spend time with it, trying to make sure it stays out of trouble, all the while creating a bond of trust between the owner and the pet. In American culture, it’s almost like having a child, something which is quite different than the majority of relationships people have with animals in Senegal, where the time to train an animal may be more limited due to the high amount of physical labor performed in a day and the necessity for rest afterwards.
When I first arrived in my village, people told me a story about one of their previous volunteers. While in Senegal, her dog at home passed away, and she was understandably devastated. People in the community had a hard time understanding why she was so upset, some even laughing at her while she was crying, because to them, it was just a dog. The story was recounted to me both by her and my host family, and understandably it did not feel good to be laughed at, though, I have come to understand that it was not necessarily mean-spirited, but more so a cultural misunderstanding of the situation due to the difference in perception of the role an animal can play in a person's life. As the story was recounted, people asked me, “Can you believe she cried?!” and I would respond, “Well of course! In American culture, we treat dogs like our babies!”
April 24, 2024 was a hot day. Around that time, the extreme temperatures ranging from 100 to 115 degrees, had just begun to return to Fouta. Amidst the evening heat, I sat on a mat in the sand, helping my namesake (or “tokora,” in Pulaar) scoop her homemade thiakry, my favorite Senegalese snack, into bags to sell in one of our village’s boutiques.
Just as the sun was starting to set, my younger host brothers and one of their friends called my name as they walked up to where we were sitting. In their hands was a small squirming bundle, from which issued a piercing high pitched meow. My namesake’s eyes widened as she suddenly cowered back. “Get that thing away from me!” she said. “I can’t look at kittens, they make me sick!” At the time, I didn’t know that a fear of kittens was common in my village, but I apologized for startling my namesake, grabbed the bundle, and brought it to the small kitchen attached to the side of my room.
Immediately afterwards, I double checked with my host family if it was alright I had a cat. They graciously agreed, despite some of them having a phobia of cats and their misgivings about her being a girl, as she would most likely have kittens later on.
In an effort to come up with a cute name that would be relatively easy for people to pronounce, I chose to call my kitten Mila. She was small and skinny, but beautiful – a miniature version of her father a long-haired, white-furred, and blue-eyed cat from Morocco, owned by one of the community leaders and an extended host family member, Mody Ba. It was also Mody who offered me the kitten in the first place after hearing I liked cats and was starting to see mice in my room.
I was fortunate that my host family was largely supportive of having a pet. Earlier on in my service they had tried to adopt a puppy, which we had named Benji, but much to the disappointment of my host siblings, Benji was stolen during his second week at the house. When Mila arrived, the kids were excited to have a new baby animal to play with again. My older host brother, Hamat, helped me to get powder milk to begin feeding her and my younger brothers Ali Sow and Allassane were excited to play with her. One time when I had to leave my site for personal business in my regional capital, Saint Louis, Mila ran away, and my older host brothers, Hamat and Ali Ba spent two hours looking for her throughout the village. When I came back and found out I thanked them and they laughed and said, “Of course! If you came back and she was gone, you’d definitely cry!”
Outside of my household, the proclivity for misunderstandings surrounding having a pet was higher. After about a month of having her, I came home after an Environment Club meeting at the primary school to my porch covered in small rocks and Mila hiding in a corner. A group of young neighborhood kids had come to throw rocks at her because they were afraid. After that, my host family and I kept a closer watch on my porch if kids came to play nearby.
Situations like that early on taught me that there were many risks of having a pet, especially a kitten that was still so vulnerable. Besides the singular rock-throwing incident, Mila was growing up in daily extreme heat, was quick to get dirty from all the dust of the dry season, and kept getting eye infections. Giving cats baths is not easy, as any cat owner knows, but it was something that was a necessary habit to form in those sorts of conditions. There were many moments where I was not sure if Mila would survive, and that if she did die I tried to prepare myself for the possibility that I might have to process the sadness of not being able to save her, largely on my own.
Slowly but surely, however, people outside of my host family began to warm up to Mila. After a couple months, in the standard greetings, where people often ask about family members, work, fatigue level, etc., neighbors and co-workers began asking me half-jokingly and half-seriously how my cat was doing. Little kids began asking to see pictures of Mila and calling her by her name. There was also a growing curiosity about why I wanted a cat and how I took care of her.
People in my community and other Peace Corps Volunteers looking to adopt a cat often asked what I fed her. Once mature enough for solid food, Mila graduated to leftover rice and fish scraps. When it became evident this was not providing her with the proper nutrients to grow (she began getting premature kitten cataracts as a result of nutrient deficiency), I began buying cat food from the western style grocery story, Auchan, which was three hours away in Saint Louis. I additionally created a litterbox in my bathroom, initially with an old cardboard box filled with sand, and took the time to train her so she would not go to the bathroom in my room. The concept of a cat toilet was funny to people, but when I explained to them how it worked, people nodded in understanding.
As Mila got older, she and I formed the typical American pet-owner relationship. I would sing to her, pet her, play with her, and give her treats. In times when I felt alone or misunderstood, I would sometimes feel more connected to Mila, because she was also the odd one out, and even more misunderstood than me, chased away often with the vocal command for cats in Senegal, “Zip!” Mila has never been a huge fan of cuddles, but allows me to pick her up and carry her around, which was something I did and still do in moments where I need some comfort. People began to see the sort of relationship I was forming with my cat, and when I started to suspect Mila was pregnant in January 2025, people asked me if they could have one of her kittens.
Over the past year, if kids were afraid of Mila, I would hold her and encourage them to pet her slowly and calmly, since fast movements or hitting can scare cats and make them scratch. I allowed neighborhood kids to come help me feed her and if she came to sit with my host family, I would toss my host siblings and their friends my keychain so they could swing it around for her to bat. Forming the cultural understanding of having a cat as a pet has been a gradual process, but when the time came for me to give away Mila’s kittens in March after she gave birth in February, I was confident that the people that I was giving them to wanted them for the right reasons and would take good care of them. We talked about what sorts of things they could do to take good care of their cats and I sent the babies to their new homes.
Watching people initially ignore Mila or view her with apprehension, to gradually having host siblings and neighborhood members calling out her name in the same high-pitched baby voice that I myself and so many other Americans use to talk to pets, shows me that people have grown to care. Maybe people care about Mila because of my relationships with them and they know she means a lot to me, but maybe it’s also because, even just a little bit, they also understand the joys of having a pet companion.
At the end of each day, coming home from work or walking back from the main house, I am met with an excited white ball of fur who follows me around as I go about my evening chores. Even my namesake, who was initially afraid of cats and remains very afraid of them, smiles in amusement about Mila’s excitement and her happy tail-up trot when I call out to her from across the yard. Though I don’t think universally throughout my village people will view having a pet differently, I do think there is a better understanding of the weight people put on their relationship with animals in American culture, and having had that be such a large part of my Peace Corps service has been rewarding.
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