Water, lack of it, food and Paradise in Ethiopia

Simon Pope (SPANA's Director of Communications) and the second part of a blog from Ethiopia

It is, in some ways, rather churlish to poke fun at a hotel in somewhere like Ethiopia. A place that provides a bed, food, is safe, quiet and doesn’t cost the earth is sometimes all you can (or should) hope for in many sub-Saharan countries. But what makes visiting places like this so enlivening is the sheer idiosyncracies of these hotels. Jeremy had said that finding a hotel with that perfect, planets-in-alignment combination of electricity, water, bath plug, food and affordability was only a hoped for Nirvana like dream. So, the Pyramid Paradise hotel in Debre Zeit had a lot to live up to.


True it had decent food. And in fact for me, as an Ethiopia newbie, I can honestly say that Ethiopian cuisine is a revelation. Tasty, interesting combinations of meat and vegetables with the unexpected bonus of a boiled egg seemingly thrown in at random.

In the firmament of Ethiopian cooking is my personal favourite, Doro Wat – a spicy, complex sauce in a bowl with chicken and the ubiquitous boiled egg which you discover, unnervingly if you are unprepared for it, like the top of a bald man’s head about half way through. Doro Wat must also surely join the legions of national dishes that sound like the baddies in Star Wars movie – Doro Wat, Tarka Dal and Khorkhog. Forming an obligatory accompaniment to every Ethiopian meal is the ubiquitous njera. This resembles large flat pancake, variously described as both an edible tablecloth and eating implement, has the look of a rather grey old dishcloth and the consistency of carpet underlay. It does not, however, taste quite as bad as it looks. This is largely due to the fact that it actually doesn’t taste of anything. It is, however, very filling and great for mopping up all the sauces, and bits and pieces that form the composite ingredients of a meal.

So the Pyramid Paradise scores on the food test but as to water.....

There was water for the shower in the morning. More, it was even warm, because the water heater and storage tank hanging precariously off the wall was almost proudly displaying a red warming-up light and making vaguely promising warming-up noises. There was, however, something fickle about my shower as it coquettishly flattered to deceive. Instead of the water issuing forth from the shower head in a steamy torrent it simply dribbled rather lamentably. This was nonethless an improvement on the cold bucket of water we’d been issued with the night before, around the surface of which various forlorn nocturnal insects were now silently floating.

Now wise to the subtle arts of Ethiopian water heaters, once it had refilled again and warmed up, I turned off the drain-cock so that the warm-ish water would still be there when I got back. I was foiled by the maid, who later turned it back on to clean the bath. The next morning I not only turned off the drain-cock but took the tap off as well. And hid it. When I got back to the hotel that night I discovered that my room had no electricity and smelt vaguely of melted cables. Surveying the bathroom by candle light I found that I may have shorted out the boiler which had been trying to heat an empty cistern.

Bang went half the hotels electrics.

Oops.

Karen meanwhile had no water at all, either cold or hot. She went in search of search of the manager but discovered en route that the pump from the main tank had broken. Disconsolately trudging back to her room she nonetheless wished a happy morning to the gardener who was merrily watering the lawn with a hosepipe.

Errr, so how does that work?

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Free as a bird

Right from the earliest days we have had a policy of ‘never turning anything away’, so when our director in Jordan got a phone call about “a huge bird landed in our garden”, he didn’t need any persuading before rushing off to check it out.
It was indeed a huge bird – a juvenile Imperial Eagle – Aquila heliaca.

It seemed to have flown into something and stunned itself, while flying south out of eastern Europe on its first migration. Young raptors are notoriously clumsy during their first year or so, and thousands are killed every year by flying into cables and wires or hit by traffic.


But fortunately, this youngster didn’t seem too badly injured, and a careful inspection back at the veterinary clinic showed no fractures or anything life-threatening, so we took him down to the wildlife garden in the Education Centre in east Amman, where he could recover quietly in a special cage, and perhaps most importantly, be kept away from human contact as much as possible. Because if you ever want to release a wild bird again, you must not let them lose their fear of man.

And Imperial Eagles have got every reason to be afraid of man. Their liking for wetland and marshland habitats has brought them all too often into conflict with fishermen and hunters – wiping them out over most of their range. In western Europe just a few pairs survive in the Coto Donana in southern Spain.
Our friend had probably come from the wilds of Eastern Europe, though they also occur right across to central Asia.

But after three weeks or so, he was fully recovered, and thriving on his diet of chicken offal – he really looked magnificent. So we gingerly transferred him to a special travelling cage (boy, that beak is sharp!), and set off down south. We wanted to get him away from the worst dangers – the miles and miles of cables and wires, as well as the dense human population around Amman.

We drove down to the mountains around Petra, where human settlement is almost non-existent, and on a stunning autumn day, we opened the cage door and let him go. After a few hesitant steps, he spread his wings and launched himself off the mountainside into the rising thermals, and effortlessly soared away up into the piercing blue sky, until he was lost from our view.

From there he could glide down to the reed-beds and swamps of the rift valley, or stay amongst the rugged peaks hunting for lizards and small rodents. A really heart-lifting moment watching him soar away, free again. The sort of moment that really makes our job so worthwhile.

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Syria

Syria has always seemed a little strange – in some ways one of the toughest police states in the world – whilst in others, welcoming and hospitable and open to all kinds of innovative suggestions. Far more get ahead in fact than their neighbours and rivals in Jordan – at least as far as SPANA’s education work is concerned.
For instance we made some really nice models of horses’ legs showing their evolution from the five-toed ancestor running around in the primeval forests through to the modern single toed ‘hoof’ of the modern horse.

“Can’t possibly show those”, said the Jordanians, “that’s evolution”.

“But, you’ve got it in your school text-books – we’ve seen it!”

“Ah, yes – but we’re now re-writing them!”

There’s progress.

No such problems in Syria – “That’s a good idea”, they said “can we have some more ideas like that please?”

So, we’re scrabbling around trying to put together the finance for a mobile education centre (a converted ex-Military coach in fact – the only left-hand drive vehicles available).

The Syrians will love it – as it travels around the country from village to village – giving children (and no doubt lots of adults) an exciting new look at the natural world about them – and drilling into them a bit of empathy for animals and respect for the environment around them.

A nice little challenge for us too – thinking up and constructing, interesting interactive displays and models to fill the bus, as well as the Arabic text panels.
Should keep us out of mischief for a bit this winter – but we’ve still got to find just a teeny-weeny bit more funding before we can get really cracking.

I suppose it goes without saying that anyone working for SPANA would have a deep love of horses – my first was a little wooden cart-horse model called Nancy that I hauled around everywhere with me before I even went to school.

But I must also confess to deep reservations about their design.

I mean, look at those stupid, spindly things they’re supposed to run around on. All those nerves and veins and arteries and tendons etc stuffed into a silly little tube, called a ‘leg’ that’s completely unprotected and meant to support all that weight above it charging around and leaping over fences and walls and other nightmare hazards. Just plain daft. Any first year architectural student putting forward a design like that would be thrown off their course.

And then look at the digestion of the silly things. What a disaster! If you give ‘em decent food they get laminitis or colic, if you don’t they lose weight and energy, and still get colic.

Colic ! What a wondrous way to confound a poor owner and generally complicate life.
And in Syria they can get it in spades from all sorts of reasons – dry food (chopped straw or ‘tibben’ is the usual winter feed) bunging up the system is perhaps the most common. Worms and parasites can do it too – and eating the plastic bags that litter the countryside is a growing problem. They can get a twisted gut – sometimes from just rolling over – and that’s normally fatal – and I bet I’ve missed out lots of other reasons.

But the colics we’ve seen this week in the villages of northern Syria – seem about the cruellest. After months of summer drought and starvation rations, along comes a bit of rain, and bingo! - the grass starts growing. Not surprisingly, thin, hungry horses think that Christmas has come early and stuff down as much of the lush new growth as they can.

Big mistake. We had three that had blown up and died last week (I think it puts too much pressure on organs like the heart and kidneys and things), and another poor old mare that I think we just about saved. But as I’m sure you know, the pain from colic makes them thrash around on the ground, ripping the skin off their knees, hips, skull and any other protruding body part. Which of course gets filthy and goes septic – turning into abscesses like this poor old girl (I’ve spared you the close-up photos) – so she’s had to endure the pain of all that on top of the colic.
It’s a tough world for a horse in Syria – in fact it is in most of our countries.

So, I say again, what a dopey design for an animal anyway.

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With Jeremy Hulme, SPANA’s CEO, off visiting our projects in Tunisia, this blog is from Simon Pope who oversees SPANA’s Communications Department.

Like many people of my generation, Ethiopia came into my consciousness about 25 years ago with the BBC reports about the drought and then the subsequent Band Aid / Live Aid initiative overseen by Bob Geldof. Now, a quarter of a century later, and with new BBC reports about droughts in the region , many commentators were asking what lasting impact all that awareness-raising and money had made on this country. On what was to be a short trip to this country of contradictions, I got a small chance to see for myself.



Ethiopia is vast. Its also densely populated, multi-cultural (predominantly Christian but with more-than-tolerated Muslim communities), green (in parts), desert (in others) friendly, welcoming and politically stable. Addis Ababa (the capital) has undoubtedly the worst air pollution I’ve ever experienced (possibly due to its lofty altitude) and some of the most inane driving as well – It’s as if everyone has been to some sort of Jedi Driving School (“Don’t look. Close your eyes. Drive by your instincts.”) where only telepathy means that an accident doesn’t occur every 30 seconds – which it probably does anyway.

SPANA’s work here is unfussy, uncomplicated and yet badly needed. Although motorised tuk-tuks are making inroads after being imported from Asia, the favoured method of transport is a horse drawn taxi - that is assuming you can’t afford a Toyota Hi-Lux and seemingly the only ones who drive those, (incredibly badly I might add, and as if they have some God-given right to do so) are UN workers.

So I join the SPANA mobile clinic team for a day, at one of its regular visit to the fairly rural town of Modjo, about 100km south of Addis Ababa. We set up the clinic in a grassy compound and the horses which just ten minutes before had been hooked up to their taxi carts, come filing in.

Despite the shade of the trees its sweltering, but the team plough on. I vaguely wonder if they might stop for a coffee break but they all know that for every minute the owners are here they are losing business, and that means losing money. So they simply don’t stop. Not even for five minutes. Everyone helps each other out. Abebow is handing Gebre fat, squirming ticks he’s removed from a horses rectum – Gebre is holding them in the palm of his hand, trapped with his other forefinger to stop them leaping to freedom before he goes away and squishes them. Kefyalew has set up an improvised practical lecture corner for a group of local vet students. Even Alex, SPANA’s driver is fetching and carrying fresh supplies of iodine and cotton wool.

There’s a second wave of arrivals – names are added to the list to ensure no-one jumps the queue. Kefyalew begins treating an injury caused by poor shoeing – these are nearly always pieces of rubber cut from old car tyres and roughly nailed on to the hoof. The village farriers are poorly trained and their work is shoddy. We see a number of injuries caused when the exiting nail ends aren’t properly turned down, so that they lacerate the opposite fetlock as the horse trots. More common is when the nail doesn’t come out where it should at all and punctures the soft part of the hoof. Its inevitably painful for the horse and invariably results in an infection, which is what’s happened here.

Kebedi is one of SPANA’s most junior staff, but he’s a wizard when it comes to hooves – a few soothing words in the ear of a rather skittish horse, a stroke of the neck and then in one smooth movement he strokes and lifts its leg.

He carefully examines the hoof deftly cleaning and paring it to find the source of infection. He files it flat , and then scans the surface again but its still eluding him. But he’s not giving up. Bent double, a heavy file in one hand and a sharp knife in the other and somehow still holding the hoof between his knees. He’s absolutely determined to help this horse out.

And then after 20 minutes of scraping, filing, squeezing, clipping, surrounded by flies, and with sweat running down his face and a bruise of his arm courtesy of a swift sly kick from the next horse in line, he finds the nail hole. He asks for me to get Iodine and I watch as he flushes out the painful looking abscess – a needleless syringe shoots Iodine into the hoof and it shoots out again just as quickly from the drain hole. He keeps at this until he’s satisfied that its thoroughly flushed out. Only then is the wound expertly dressed, and after a shot of antibiotics its bandaged hoof hasn’t even touched the ground before he’s calling for the next patient. Job done. But his face shows real pride for that one moment as the horse gingerly steps away, and then he’s back to work again, bent double and already stripping the rubber shoe off the next one.

Its gone one o'clock when the last of the horses leaves the compound. A check on the stats shows that in 4 hours, 85 horses were assessed, treated and sent home in a better shape than when they arrived.

(PS - Another Blog from Ethiopia to follow later this week,...)

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The centre of Tunisia is a whole world away from the Tunisia where tourists flock to the beaches and posh hotels.

Poor soils, dry and barren, the people struggle to make a meagre living off the land. It’s got very little going for it.

The north has more rain, better soil, forests with wood and game – the south, albeit desert, has oases packed with date palms (yielding over £200 per tree in a good year), as well as flocks of tourists streaming forth for their one-day ‘desert experience’ dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, but with baseball cap and trainers.

But the middle? Nothing.

So, ideal territory for SPANA.

We were at the souk in Sbeitla on Wednesday – with the team from Kasserine. Still hundreds of animals, bringing people and their goods to and from the market. We treat forty-nine cases in the morning – from the usual sores and wounds, to one with a touch of pneumonia, and several ‘old soldiers’ needing their teeth rasped. Sadly, there is no injection you can give to cure old age. (I know that only too well, after I’ve spent a few hours holding up legs for the farrier).

But the biggest problem for a lot of these animals is not old age – but youth.
That is to say, not their own youth, but the youth of the stockmen put in charge of them. And to call them stockmen, is to insult that noble calling.

I stood and watched, all morning, as sad, ill-educated, brutal and frustrated teenage boys took out all their bitterness on the poor wretched donkeys and mules in their charge.

Whipping them with steel reinforcing rods, or rubber tubing – it was a great pleasure to stand at the exit from the souk with the SPANA team and confiscate all the whips, one by one.

Was I being overly-sentimental if I thought I saw a wry smile on the faces of their donkeys and mules as they trotted past?

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