Mauritania

The BBC used to announce occasionally “the following programme is not for those of a weak or squeamish disposition” – so it is with the next story, and especially the photos – though redeemed by a happy ending.


Let me explain – the capital of Mauritania, Nouakchott was not planned very well when it was created in the desert about fifty years ago – mainly, they forgot to install any water system.

So, there are in excess of seventy thousand donkeys pulling carts with two forty-gallon drums of water round the streets, for the good citizens to buy.
Looking after those donkeys is the principal work of SPANA in the country.

It gets even more bizarre.

There is no agriculture – the city is smack in the middle of a desert – so everything has to be imported, or carted up from the Senegal river valley in the south – making everything pretty expensive. The resulting diet for the donkeys has become based on cardboard boxes. They’re cut up, it’s true, and some millet meal is added – but basically that’s what these donks – labouring ten to twelve hours a day -do it on. And I have to say, it’s amazing, but they look pretty good on it. I suppose cardboard is cellulose after all, and they get about three kilos a day.

Anyway, you very seldom see a thin donkey.

But their biggest problem is the cart and its steering – or lack of it. They don’t have any bridles or reins, so the drivers steer the animals by whopping the round the side of the head, opposite to the way they want them to turn. (Admittedly, the better drivers just hit the shafts alongside the body). This can cause horrific wounds – we have had a campaign, making and distributing six thousand head-collars – to try and change the system – but we still see terrible damage.

Yesterday, we saw this poor wretched creature, with a swelling the size of a football on it’s flank. Worse, the wretched creature that owned it, had then ‘fired’ the original wound with a red hot iron – eventually creating this enormous abscess.

The animal was trembling with the shock and pain of it.

We cleaned it, and shaved the incision point, and blurghh – at least three litres of pus and blood hosed out. Just the job before lunch.

We took it back to the clinic, and with drainage put into the wound, antibiotics and plenty of TLC, the animal was unrecognisable this morning, tucking into his grub, after a good night’s sleep.

I know what I’d like to do to that owner.