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As you may have seen on social media in recent weeks, Chappy House held free a spay-and-neuter clinic in Port Elizabeth. It was one of those fantastic community efforts, with kudos to Ngaere Durling. The clinic brought together seven physicians from Suriname, Canada, and the United States, all working with Caribbean Spay and Neuter. On island, they met with a team of volunteers and performed 60 procedures.
Amazing, but that was, in some senses, just the beginning. There’s a video of one of the physicians speaking to a group of young people, in the gentlest of terms, describing what they were doing and why. Amanda and Akeem of D’Original Southie Doubles were there handing out food—everyone who brought a dog got a free double, and many others did, too. In the photos were boxes of supplies, which, of course, didn’t arrive on their own. They were there because someone pitched in where they could.
The background to all of it was children’s art hanging on the walls—paintings, math homework on the chalkboards, a huge cardboard whale. The clinic was hosted at the Learning Centre, one of the projects run by the Grenadines Initiative. The children the surgeon was speaking to were there in part because there were doubles and puppies, but also because the Learning Centre is a familiar, welcoming space. That’s what it exists for—to provide a place for kids to gather, bum to bum on a bench, learning about their world and sharing time together.
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