R.I.P Don Ramon

Don Ramon was, until very recently, a treasured member of the family. I am a lover of animals and it was hard to say goodbye to my best pals Bobby, Joey and Jenny when I left for Colombia. Looking after Don Ramon helped to sooth the pain of missing my darling kittens, but now he is gone and it’s all my fault.

On Wednesday evening we realised the hamster had not been let out of his cage for the past two nights. We usually let him play in his ball for a good few hours once we get home from work, but for two whole evenings we had neglected the poor soul.

On realising this, I decided to give him an “extra special treat”. Instead of putting him in his ball, like usual, I allowed him to run around my bedroom, free to explore. Initially he seemed very pleased about this and spent ages investigating, scratching and chewing to his heart’s content. What I had failed to notice however, was the gap under my wardrobe, where it was possible for the creature to enter the dingy insides of the flat.

As I saw him approach the gap, I cried, “NO, DON RAMON!” But it was too late. Already I could see him scuttling around the gloomy underworld of my room. It was hard to see what it was like in there, but I assumed he would find his way back and at midnight I left him some food by the wardrobe and went to sleep.

By Thursday evening his food remained uneaten and I started to panic. I enlisted the help of my housemates (the owners of the hamster) and we attempted a rescue mission. We bashed down a wooden panel to get a closer look at what was going on.

As it turns out, the poo pipe goes from the bathroom through this part of my room and beside the poo pipe is a gaping hole, which probably stretches the entire 5-floors of the building. Don Ramon could be in real trouble.

We began tossing food down the hole and made a rescue rope out of some old jeans in the hope he would scramble back up. He didn’t.

There was talk of attaching his water bottle to some string and lowering it into the hole, just like the trapped Chilean miners, Laura pointed out. But really, by this point we had accepted the truth and we know now that Don Ramon is not coming back.

Marcela said, “You don’t want him back now, he’s already caught gonorrhea from a rat.” A gruesome thought.

I am more optimistic and sometimes I imagine him living an exciting new life in the wild. Perhaps he has made some (STI-free) rat friends and developed a taste for cockroaches.

I drew this picture in my first week here. I had been sitting on the sofa with Laura, chatting away for 3 hours. We realised after a while that throughout our entire conversation, Don Ramon had been doing laps of the kitchen, one end to another and back again. Earlier that week we had been talking loudly about how hamsters in the wild supposedly run 5km a night. Don Ramon must have overheard us and taken measurements of the kitchen to figure out how many laps he should do to compete with his contemporaries in the wild.

Looking back, he was probably in training for his escape to the wild. I have absolute faith in him and believe he is doing all he can to live a long and prosperous life.

We miss you Don Ramon.