By Susanna Patari | Project manager, crazy cat lady
MEOW and December greetings from Gili Trawangan!
The weather is hot and humid, sun is shining, but looks like rainy season is finally slowly starting, bringing us much needed rain. We’ve had several weeks of low season on tourism now, which has been fine, we all needed a bit of a break after busy high season. Christmas season is just around the corner, and everyone is expecting and hoping the island to get bit more busy soon.
As this is our end-of-the-year report, we’ll have a look at some highlights of our 2023 in just a bit, but first let’s see what we did just recently.
Free CAT CLINIC day: Snip-snip here and chop-chop there!
We organized a free cat clinic day in the beginning of December. 45 cats and kittens visited our vets and 32 cats were spayed or neutered during this clinic.
We had so many cats in our care that it made sense for us to organize a vet visit to get all our cats spayed and neutered. We were extremely happy to get back into doing clinics, since it had been two whole years we haven’t been able to organize anything. Mostly due to financial reasons (which pretty much means: NO MONEY) but also because there now is a vet clinic on the island permanently, so people have been able to get their cats spayed and neutered there. However, now we alone had so many cats in our care needing spay/neuter, plus our friends had more, so we decided to organize our own vet to come over.
Our good friend supervet Rini agreed to come over from Jakarta. Vet Rini has been coming to Gili islands for years to do spay/neuter clinics with us, she’s been our clinic supervisor, so she knows our island cat population very well and knows the issues our cats often deal with. She has spayed and neutered hundreds of cats during our cat clinics in Gili islands.
On the clinic day (December 3rd) 43 cats visited our vets. 32 cats were spayed or neutered. 9 were tiny kittens too young for surgery. Two cats turned out to have been done already but had no ear marks, so we only marked their ears to avoid them ending up being brought to future clinics. Marking the ears is a common practice to mark spayed and neutered cats anywhere in the world where there are big stray cat populations.
The next day the vet team did one wound surgery for our Mr.Dah, who has a stubborn wound under his tail. And vets also gave a check up to our little Mona, who is not feeling well.
In total our vets met 45 cats, a bit more than we expected, so we were very happy about that!
This clinic was the 22nd clinic we have organised since Cats Of Gili project was launched 10 years ago.
Highlights of 2023:
We opened our little cat café in mid-April this year, in hopes to get more people to come visit us and boost the merchandise sales in our charity shop. Although we certainly did not need more work, it has been worth it. More people have visited us and our cats and they have learned about our work. And any money people leave behind, whether it’s been spend on an iced coffee drink, or buying a new cool T-shirt or cash dropped in our donation box: every rupiah helps us continue our work.
FINALLY! After years of trying to find a solution to re-use the mountain of empty cat food and toilet litter bags we are responsible for, we finally found Ibu W in Lombok who started to make us lovely little pouches, wallets, tote bags, beach bags etc from the material we send to her. We save all empty cat food and toilet litter bags, and recycle them to this cause.
After not having our own clinics for two whole years, it was so amazing we were finally able to organize a clinic day of our own. We will continue organizing free cat clinic days, whenever we see there is a need for one.
We didn’t make any noise about it, didn’t have parties or such, but this year was our anniversary year: 10 years of Cats Of Gili action! We started back in 2013, so for a full decade now we have been working hard to make our island cats healthier and happier. The past 10 years have not been easy, with erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics and what not, but no regrets, never stop the madness, and all for the love of cats. Massive thanks to everyone who has helped us keep going over the past 10 years!
And we will continue to do what have been doing: help cats and kittens in need.
During this year, we’ve had 77 cats or kittens in our care (at the time of writing this, Dec 12th). Some have stayed only a little while, some have stayed for months, some will stay forever.
THANK YOU FOR DONATING! WE COULD NOT DO ALL THIS WITHOUT YOUR SUPPORT!
We are sending loud, warm purrs to everyone who has donated to our island kitties this year! Your support means a lot and enables us to continue our work with Gili island kitties.
We wish you all a very merry Christmas and all the best for 2024.
Thank you, terima kasih, kiitos, purr!
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