Groping to find the face of my hostess in order to politely exchange three cheek kisses, the blast of heat (which had fogged my glasses in the first place) nearly drove me back outside. Gasping slightly, I ripped off my jacket and tried to remove my muddy shoes without falling over or stepping on any of the dark creatures shooting past my ankles, all the while smiling widely and blindly in the general direction of the lady's Polish welcoming chatter.

I had long wanted to meet Marta Karas, a woman with whom my husband attended Marie-Curie University in Lublin some 20 years ago where she had studied archaeology. It wasn't due to intellectual curiosity that we navigated hours of rutted back roads through the Polish countryside, asking for the cat lady's whereabouts once we ascertained her village. It wasn't a deep-seated quest for palaeoethnographic knowledge that sent me tip-toeing over a foot-wide precariously fragile splintering bridge, then scrambling to the very top of a nearly perpendicular wet grassy hill. No, the reason for the visit was only that I like cats and my husband told me that Marta had 31 of them!

Except for the cats, Marta lives alone in her one room cottage. There's no bathroom but obviously the wood stove serves all heating needs quite admirably. Her tiny village, the inhabitants of which shake their heads over the crazy cat lady, is near a gorgeous medieval Polish town called Kazimierz where tourist money is spent freely but which economic prosperity bypasses the tiny surrounding hamlets, leaving their aging populations largely unemployed, leading subsistence existences.

Although she's jobless, like nearly 20% of all Poles -- highly educated or not -- Marta's somehow managed to have all of the animals spayed or neutered at her own expense. She's found homes for many of them although her own tiny abode is too well known as a drop-off station. Poland, still being a relatively poor country in comparison with the US or Canada, for instance, does not have funding for animal shelters especially in the countryside. In fact, only recently did I hear of one being put up in Lublin, a city of some half a million people and home to five universities. Any rescue/shelter work that people do is strictly out-of-pocket.

The US dollar is worth roughly three times the Polish zloty. Although vet care and medicines are very cheap, cat food is quite expensive comparatively speaking, on par with the cost in North America. In other words, $10 US would buy 5 large cans of cat food and one big bag of dry food, enough to feed her current gang for a couple of days.

If you wish to help out, you'll have to send Marta a money order by registered mail as she does not have a telephone or internet. Please note that she does not speak or read English. Her mailing address is: Marta Karas, 24-310 Karczmiska Drugie, Poland.