When I first met Sarah, I knew Care for Dogs was about to grow.

At that time, a year ago, I had become tired of running around here and there every day, waking up each morning to think “was the dog I helped the previous day for real, or just a nightmare that was becoming all too real?” and becoming increasingly aware of starting to dislike the native people who I lived amongst, as they represented the threat to the dogs I was trying to help.

Having returned to Care for Dogs, I now find my prediction was correct and each time I meet Sarah or touch any of her work, I am reminded of how far our group has come in such a short time.

Sarah typically spends 5 days a week at the shelter. It’s her office job.

Now to think of it as an office is ludicrous as within the confines of a hot, humid, dark and cramped 2 room wooden cabin, which turns into the home for 2 workers living accommodation at night, Sarah has established an organised food distribution centre, a comprehensive dog medical record card system with cross referenced and properly maintained medical supplies and in effect a control point for assessment of what needs doing, by whom and when.

It’s a tight run ship and the team of 3 staff know exactly what they are doing from hour to hour because Sarah has the interests of the dogs at heart and whether it is cleaning, feeding, medicating or dressing wounds, they are adequately trained by her and supervised constantly to ensure the dogs get what they deserve.

Recently, I asked Sarah to tell me a little about herself and her work as a volunteer at Care for Dogs. I am sure you will appreciate why I feel so compelled to highlight her commitment her in this post.

This is what she had to say:

I am originally from New Zealand where I left when I was 26 and a half, to do the big “OE” thing, the overseas experience thing and went to London. I am originally from the hotel industry and I was the private events or banqueting manager for a really nice hotel there when I met my partner Julian.

We were in London together for 5 years and then came across to Malaysia. I had always wanted to do charity work and was a big animal lover too, animals in general and we figured out that Julian could work in Malaysia then I could start the charity work I wanted to do.

I volunteered with an animal shelter in Malaysia and did that for about 2 years. That was doing very similar things to what I do here, in terms of medications, vaccines but was mainly based around co-ordinating volunteers.

After 2 years we moved to Chiang Mai and finally I was able to do a little more of what I really wanted to do and that is the nursing medical care and I am absolutely loving it.

I asked Sarah about her daily schedule, what she actually did each day:

Usually I come in at 8 and help the 3 guys with the feeding because basically between 8 and 11 there is a heck of a lot of work to do because there is so much cleaning and all the dogs to be fed.

We have a lot of special cases requiring extra feeding or nursing. Checking that the medicines are being given correctly, we have ear and eye medications, tablet medications, ivomectin for mange, making sure all of that is being done appropriately and then at about 11 we do the wound dressing round. At any one time we have between 3 to 8 dogs requiring fairly detailed wound dressing so I will do that along with 1 or 2 of the guys.

We have vet runs during the week, obviously I don’t go on all the runs but I need to co-ordinate which dogs are to go and know what changes to their treatments will be. Usually we do that on Mondays but sometimes we have 2 or 3 medical runs dependent upon how many medical cases we have in. We have been doing sterilisation runs on Tuesdays but now we doing Wednesdays as well, trying to increase our sterilisation numbers and we do TvT cases on Saturdays. Currently we have a vet coming in to do those, so that’s wonderful.

All that before lunch and then…

We have volunteers coming into the shelter that I need to ensure know what they are to do and sometimes I can be kept busy with reacting to additional medical care activity arising from them finding a problem with the dogs they are dealing with.

I also spend a lot of time dealing with visitors arriving at the shelter unannounced. Gill, who is also here a lot of the time, is a great help or if they only speak Thai, then we will get Gulab over to interpret. Sometimes visitors want to adopt a dog or maybe make a donation. Sometimes they just want to be with the dogs for a while. And then the phone rings occasionally!

Yeah, most days are pretty busy but what I love to be able to do is actually just sit with the dogs and give them love and cuddles and being that now things are more organised and having more volunteers at the shelter, I am finding more time to do what I really enjoy.

Recently, we have had a real increase in what I call “Tourist Volunteers” who are people who are traveling and may stay in Chiang Mai 3 - 6 weeks, who come to Care for Dogs and end up in coming in 3 - 5 times a week and this is fantastic for us. Generally these are people with a lot of initiative, with a lot of ‘get & go’ and they just get stuck into it and you don’t need to overly correct or supervise them, which is just wonderful.

There you have it, an outline of a tremendous asset to Care for Dogs, someone who not only commits 110% but also delivers something to make the organisation grow.

You can read Sarah’s profile here …