Feeding the Cat

I mentioned in an earlier post that I noticed a cat while Linda, Kate, Heather and I were having a delightful dinner outside at the Mille Collines on that Saturday that we spent together. Until that moment, I had only seen one other cat in the whole time we were in Rwanda. The other one was glimpsed as it dashed across a road at night by the Cactus Restaurant. A number of the people on our trip had noticed the shortage of cats. People don’t keep cats as pets in Rwanda, as I was to discover.

When I saw the cat at the hotel, I asked a waiter about it. He said yes the cat lived at the hotel, but no, no-one fed him. At that moment I resolved that I would feed him for as long as I was there.

The next day, when Linda and I were at the Nakumat, which is a chain of grocery stores in Kenya and Rwanda, we looked for cat food. I asked a clerk in the store where I could find cat food. This is a play by play of our conversation translated into English:
Me: Can you tell me, please, where I might find cat food?
Clerk: Cat food?
Me: Yes, cat food.
Clerk: What is cat food?
Me: It is food for cats.
Clerk: Food for cats?
Me: Yes, food for cats. Food for cats that live in your house as companions.
Clerk -horrified, apparently: Cats live in your house?
Me: Yes, I have four cats living in my house.
Clerk: Four cats live in your house?
Me: Yes. In Canada. But there is a cat at my hotel that I would like to feed.
Clerk: There is no cat food here. No one has a cat. No one feeds cats.
Me: I do. Do you have dog food?
Clerk: Yes, of course we have dog food, I will show you. (and here he sets out at a dead run with Linda and me hurrying along in his wake. The dog food is outside the main food area, past the rugs and luggage , past the sporting goods (they have everything in the Nakumat!) and past the lighting section. When we finally get to the dog food, we see a sad selection of three bags of one kind of food, no canned dog food)
Me: Thank you, I will have to buy some tuna.
Clerk: Tuna?
Me: Yes tuna. For the cat.
Clerk: Tuna for the cat?
Me: Yes. Thank you for your time.

So I bought a can of tuna packed in water/brine, and the next night I opened it (lucky we brought a can opener) and jumbled it up with a fork, and then took it downstairs and outside to the garden, and placed it in a flower bed near where I had seen the cat. We kind of had to sneak around the security guard, and I think he might have seen me putting the tuna in the garden. I put out more tuna the next day.