We were walking past the Singapore Embassy on the DQ when we saw a family getting out of their car. Although we were on the opposite side of the street, it was clear the little boy was intrigued by Sahraa and wanted to meet her. His father brought him over to make her acquaintance, and he was delighted to get to pet her. I asked if I could take their picture; the father said yes, so here it is.

It’s difficult for Sahraa here because she is used to getting a lot of attention both at home and on the street, but Arabs in general don’t like dogs – in supermarkets, there is a lot of cat food but not a single can of dog food – and the foreign laborers are afraid of dogs (so she has to be locked in a room when they come to the house), so very few people want to even get close to her. I think she is very offended by this!

It was quite a lot of work to get permission to even import her into the country (despite the fact that she’s from Kuwait, so this is almost home to her) – local Budapest vet health check, Hungarian national vet health check, securing an EU passport so she could transit Germany, certification by the Saudi Embassy in Budapest that she is a guard dog (or a service dog, those are the only two options), forwarding all the documentation to Riyadh to get an import permit – only to have the Lufthansa ticket agent in Frankfurt tell us that we were not allowed to bring her into the KSA. I almost had heart failure, but it turned out she was looking at the wrong ticket, and in the end everything was in order.