Ups and downs

Every few months, it feels like we enter a period where everything decides to happen at once, not just one unexpected problem, but five, ten, sometimes more. They don’t take turns, they overlap. While you’re trying to solve one, another appears, and before you’ve had time to deal with either of them, the phone rings again.

This has been one of those weeks...

On our way back from Cluj, our van broke down, just a few days earlier, it had already needed a new set of tyres, another 2,000 RON that simply couldn’t be postponed.

Our Opel Combo continues to remind us that it has long passed the point where it should have retired. It rains inside it, every trip to the veterinarian comes with a little uncertainty, yet it remains the car that is most used for our day to day activities.

At Dumbrava, the underground water pipe also gave up. Besides the work needed to repair it, we already know the June water bill reflects the leak: 463.67 RON that literally disappeared into the ground.

As if that wasn’t enough, one of the four tiny kittens we recently took in didn’t survive. We had hoped things would turn out differently, but sometimes hope is simply not enough.

That same day, another call came, this time, it was a one-day-old kitten that had nowhere else to go. Now, instead of mourning the one we lost, we are bottle-feeding another little life that depends on good kitten milk, warmth and round-the-clock care. Life doesn’t really pause to let us process loss before asking us to make another decision.

Meanwhile, Roxy now needs physiotherapy. Unfortunately, the treatment she needs is only available in Cluj, which means more travel, more appointments, more fuel and more time spent on the road.

And all of this is happening on top of what our days normally look like. The children still come to Dumbrava, the seniors still look forward to our monthly gatherings, vaccinations cannot be postponed, treatments still have to be given twice a day, veterinary check-ups still happen whether it has been a good week or a bad one, the animals still need to be fed, cleaned and cared for every single day.

The animals don’t know the van broke down, the children don’t know the water pipe burst, the seniors don’t know we’ve spent the morning trying to solve mechanical problems. For them, today is simply another day, and they deserve for it to remain that way.

When people ask us why we sometimes seem tired, this is usually the answer, it isn’t one big disaster that wears us down, it’s the accumulation of dozens of unexpected situations, each one demanding time, energy and money, all while the rest of our work continues exactly as before.

The good news is that these periods always pass, the tyres eventually got replaced, the pipe got repaired, the van will get fixed, Roxy will hopefully recover, the remaining kittens continue to gro and lowly, life will return to something that feels a little more normal… until the next period reminds us once again that running a small NGO has never been about predictable days.

Until then, we simply keep going.

If you would like to help us through weeks like these, every donation makes a difference, whether it helps cover transport to Cluj, veterinary treatments, unexpected repairs, quality kitten milk for the newborn, or simply the everyday care of the children, seniors and animals who depend on us, it allows us to keep saying “yes” when we otherwise might not be able to.

Because the challenges change from one week to the next, the mission doesn’t.