UNHCR Compound, Iriba

One thing we are continually being told is just how important water is here. On the flight up to the North last week, the pervasive Sahara became more and more evident, and today we saw just what an all-consuming task the search for water is.

We set off on a 5-car convoy, led by our new friends from the army (we have taken individual posed photos of them all, shouldering arms, looking mean, and one even on the back of a camel...all at their request). Today's itinerary is designed to give us an idea of how local animal owners cope in this harsh environment. And so we drive miles out over bleak arid plains, temporarily (at least) transformed by the rains into seemingly endless acres of waving grass. Criss-crossing the plains are broad dry river beds, or wadis, which sustain magnificent and ancient old trees, and in places verdant patches of greenery and even permanent bodies of water at which hundreds of animals are being watered. The villagers we met seemed content and peaceable. Their ways of life have changed little in centuries, and yet they have to be versatile to cope with bad seasons of rain, or outbreaks of disease amongst their cattle. The SPANA mission is one they are genuinely interested in, and we are overrun at nearly every stop.

We get back to Iriba with a fuller picture of how a livestock owner copes in this environment. We also discover that we have a water issue ourselves - there isn't any. If fact there hasn't been any since Thursday evening. Beer is really the only alternative but even we can't wash in beer (although I did once know someone who did just that).

Thankfully our colleagues at Oxfam, with whom we share a table at mealtimes, offer us access to their bowser, so we make a short journey cross town in their car in total darkness, fill up buckets and empty bottles and begin a very slow journey homewards.

It's impossible not to think of Stuart Hall and Eddie Waring commentating on "It's a Knockout" as the water sloshes around, but we have enough to wash and clean our teeth with. Quite an easy task compared with what we'e seen today - donkeys being loaded up with water barrels and buckets by small children, who have first dug holes in the sandy bottoms of dry rivers. They do at least have their donkeys to help them home.

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UNHCR Compound, Iriba

We woke nice and early this morning, about four o’clock to be precise. Some blooming cockerel was courting his lady friends, just outside the window. I know SPANA is meant to be all about protecting animals, but I swear, a couple more hours of ‘Little Red Rooster’, and we’ll be enjoying roast chicken for dinner.
But at least it got us up and away nice and early, off to see the refugee camps around Iridimi.

Of course you have to have a detachment of the local Coldstream Guards along for ‘security’ – which means a lot of hanging around and gesticulating, handshaking and kissing before we finally hit the road.

The landscape is a little softer here, more trees and more grass on undulating terrain – with occasional flashes of vivid colour as bee-eaters, ‘superb starlings’ and other unnamed jewels dart amongst the brush on either side. There seem fewer villages as well – yet every so often we pass a herd of sleek, shiny goats, knee-deep in thick grass, while the goat herds wave enthusiastically at our trucks.
Then finally we’re in Iridimi camp, bleak and desolate, yet with striking images as women in fabulous coloured robes struggle to move their livestock or ride donkeys through the swirling sand.

The wind is a real curse – modern cameras just do not like being filled with fine, wind-blown dust, and when one can taste it, and feel it in your eyes and nose, it’s scary to think what it must be doing to all those tiny little motors and moving parts. Yet, it’s impossible to resist trying to film small, laughing children playing in front of their shacks and donkeys…

Then we have a meeting organised for the ‘sheiks’ of the camp – back in their homes in Darfur they would have been the village headmen – and other members of the camp committee – mostly women.

With quiet dignity they told us of their problems, particularly about their animals, reinforcing, if it was ever necessary, the fundamental truth that these people absolutely rely on their animals. We gently pry from them the symptoms of the many deaths they have suffered. Anthrax is common, but also PPR and Sheep-pox, similar to Smallpox, and just as deadly.

Gradually a picture emerges. They say they are short of water, grazing and firewood, and of course veterinary help when problems occur. But perhaps more worrying, for the first time we are hearing about problems with the local villagers – sometimes ending in violence, and usually aimed at the women.

Afterwards, we head for Touloum, slightly bigger than Iridimi, but with the same sort of problems.

Meanwhile, Simon, who had been eating all sorts of strange things recently, but certainly not fish, gradually went green around the gills and was forced to leave us very suddenly, and was last seen heading rapidly towards the horizon looking for a nice, thick, friendly bush to hide behind.

Once again we heard from the headmen and women the usual list of complaints: water, firewood, animal feed etc. But again, and this time even more vehemently, they complained of the growing hostility from the local villagers. One woman complained that she had been cutting grass to bring back to the camp, when she was attacked, her grass taken, her sickle stolen, but worst of all, they took her beloved donkey.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised – many villagers feel all the aid goes to refugees, while they lose a lot of the best grazing – yet in the midst of all the problems and misery, it is just one extra burden the world could do without.

Jeremy Hulme, CEO SPANA

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UNHCR Compound, Iriba

We left Bahai at about 8.30 this morning full of uncertainty about how or when we were going to get down to the next, more southerly set of refugee camps gathered around the town of Iriba. Although actual distances between places is not immense, there are no roads as such, just tracks in the sand.

The vital flights that connect the camps and facilitate the aid workers effort are operated by the amazingly well-organised non-profit organisation Air Serv International, who as an added plus have good-humoured and flexible pilots. As a consequence we find ourselves airborne, flying south to Iriba. Below us, we can see a long group of traditional Arab nomabs livestock: laden camels, a string of goats or sheep and then the family on horse back. They are carrying out their traditional "transhumance" or seasonal migration to take advantage of the lush pasture brought about by the recent rains - in an area where competition for natural resources has always been a struggle, the conflict in neighbouring Sudan (just a few kilometres from Bahai, and which is as much a clash between cultures as anything else) means that tolerance of Arab nomads amongst Chadian villagers is diminishing. In truth the situation is far more complicated than can be summarised here, but it gives just some idea of how difficult the task is for us to find a soloution which reflects the interest of all livestock owners in the region.

Iriba is a photogenic African village, and after dumping our kit in the UNHCR compound, and once again mentally congratulating whoever had the presence of mind to install wi-fi here, we go off to meet at first the District Prefecture, and then the genial Canadian Director of the Care International office here. SPANA is funding some Community Animal Health Workers in the three refugee camps they manage and we shall be visiting them over the next few days. It's now mid-afternoon, and we are off to meet the Sultan of the region. I have put on a clean shirt for the occasion.

The Sultan has a real Palace. We breeze in through his gates in our 4x4 Toyota, and dislodge part of his gatehouse with our radio antenna. In the corner of the palace forecourt is a well kept but ancient John Deere tractor. We take our shoes off, go up the steps and inside. In his snow-white robes the Sultan, who had been sitting on the ground in front of his imposing throne, stands up to greet us. This is a scene, I think, that people like Mungo Park, TE Lawrence and even Livingstone will have found familiar. We pay our dutiful respects to the Sultan, who listens, but keeps and eye on the TV playing Arabic music beamed from Sudan. After hearing what SPANA is about, he listens more intently. A memory stirs in which I am reminded that when I was a small boy, I had some aspiration to sit on the floor of a Sultan's Palace chatting with the big man. Even the accoutrements of a modern Sultan (mobile phone, cable TV, funky fly-swat with built in torch) can't dispell my enthusiasm for having ticked this "to do" item off my life list.

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UNHCR Compound, Bahai

Woken up this morning at 5.40am by ‘Dick Van Dyke’, an itinerant Dutch solar-cooker ("cuisine solaire") salesman, switching on his radio, full blast. Dick is our ‘new friend’, working hard to get the ‘most annoying man in Africa’ award – and boy, I think he’s going to make it, with a record score. Not only does he monopolise the one bathroom and loo, he will also help himself to the best room, the best seat in any vehicle. Even worse, he demands that everyone else gives up their baggage allowance on the little planes here, so he can get his damn cookers in the hold.

People adopt a strange ‘mockney’ accent, saying “Hullo, Mary Poppins” whenever the poor fellow rushes purposefully past. “Zere’s ten sousand vimmin waitink for me in ze camps”, he announced solemnly. He must have wondered why we all started sniggering. “Oh, so that’s what he’s got in that case – Viagra”, someone whispered.

Thankfully we managed to lose him at the little airport in Abeche, where we found ourselves boarding a nine-seater bound for the camps in the north – round Bahai, close up to the Sudanese border, landing on a grassland airstrip.
Complete with armed guards – you can’t go any where here without turbaned ‘cool dudes with the shades’ waving Kalashnikovs around. "Government Security", someone said. Well, perhaps. They certainly weren’t the Coldstream Guards. We drove past abandoned villages, and others with wonderful, huge thatched-roofed huts, and children herding goats and sheep. Because a miracle has occurred this year – rain! Lots of it! And so, just for once, the plains are a sea of waving grass. Camels stand idly by, chewing the cud and looking disdainfully at us, as only camels can. And of course there are donkeys everywhere.

Eventually we come to the place we have really travelled all this way to see, Oure Cassoni refugee camp. Home to twenty-two thousand traumatised ex-villagers from central Darfur, and their animals – approaching forty thousand head.
We were given a warm and hearty welcome as we sat down to talk to the village ‘committee’, along with the local aid workers, to try and find out their needs and problems and start to think of a plan to help them and there animals survive in this often harsh and unforgiving land.

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UNHCR Compound, Abeche

The UN compound in Abeche is something of an oasis. I’m currently sitting on a wooden table underneath a straw roof providing shade from the hot afternoon sun. The 14-seater WFP (World Food Program) flight across from Ndjamena takes just 90 minutes, and we disembark into the now searing heat rebounding off the tarmac runway. Our friends from UNHCR greet us warmly and we go through the process of dutifully presenting our credentials and permits to travel to the jovial police commissar at the airport station. And then we are off into Abeche.

It's fair to say that the town is not blessed with a picturesque location, or a range of historical buildings, but it has quite an atmosphere. Low level, sandy-coloured buildings, surrounded by high ochre-coloured walls. Unmade streets passable only by black nosed donkeys, goats or 4x4’s. A thriving, colourful market selling everything from melons to motorbikes, and offering haircuts alongside 10 foot stacks of mattresses. The UNHCR compound is down a side street and is something like an airport departure lounge – British, French, Dutch, Chadian, Cameroonian and American aid workers jostle, congregate, meet, share news, swap information, come and go all day. A meeting with the head of the UNHCR programme here follows a meeting with the local head of the Government Livestock service. It's clear that, as we learned in May, there is a real enthusiasm and need for SPANA’s involvement in drawing up a strategy for livestock in the region. A strategy is needed, so that the crucial resource of livestock for the people is safeguarded and strengthened. As the sun sinks lower in the sky, we talk about the challenge ahead, and the big area we have to cover in order to meet the challenge that has been set for us. Tomorrow will see us meet with representatives of charities working on the ground. The lights come on and the sky burns orange.
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Evening – When we travel to places like this, we always have to accept (and are grateful for) the accommodation that’s provided. That said, we always hope for a comfy bed and a shower. In El Fasher in Darfur, we gritted our teeth at the terrifying toilets (more insects that London Zoo), and in Mandera in Kenya, our guest house was a converted prison, and the cells our bedrooms.

Here in Abeche, we are staying in a guest house run by the German aid agency, GTZ. It's at least a four star on the SPANA approval rating. Even the fact that the light in the shower wasn’t working was a plus, since it disguised the fact that there was a spider the size of an octopus lurking by the plug hole. On a quick stroll round the compound before turning in I disturb a toad, of which there are a large number seemingly brought out because of the recent heavy rains. This one decides to leap acrobatically six feet into the bottom of a vehicle inspection pit, from which he glares accusingly up at me. I can’t leave him there to an oily fate, so after negotiating greasy engine blocks and buckets of black sump oil I liberate Mr (or Mrs…) Toad and turn in.

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Novotel Hotel, Ndjamena, Chad

It's wet and raining at Heathrow. A short hop to Paris and a longer hop down to Chad, flying over the Sahara and the Hoggar Mountains sees us arrive in Ndjamena bang on time at 8.45pm. Compared to our last visit in May, we fairly race through the customs procedure. Our fellow passengers on the packed flight from Paris are a curious assortment of charity workers, oil workers (a major source of income for Chad’s current and future economy), and others from a range of Francophone West African nations.
Past a final baggage check and I spot a smiling UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) driver, who is waving a sign labelled “UNHCR SPANA". We have arrived, in more ways than one.

Piling into the UN minibus I recalled coming out of the airport forecourt in May. Peering into the night, Jeremy and I could make out the vague shapes of taxis in the distance, all of which on closer inspection were empty. Most looked fit only for the scrapyard – banana yellow rusting Renault 12’s. Eventually we found one with a sleeping driver, who on being roused from his slumber agreed to take us to the Meridien hotel. After 200 yards, the car ran out of petrol, and our driver disappeared, robes flowing behind him, into the night with a plastic bottle. It was very dark, very hot and very quiet. And still we waited. Moped drivers loomed out of the gloom and peered at us like animals in the zoo. Eventually our driver reappeared, bottle filled with petrol, and we duly limped, coughing and wheezing (and that was just the car) into the forecourt of the Meridien Hotel. The concierge was doubled up with laughter, and we suffered a barrage of angry beeping as our bananamobile blocked the sleek landcruisers belonging to some bigger better known NGO’s.

So this time, blushes were spared. Early start tomorrow – 6am pick up and an early flight east to Abeche, which lies just 150km from the border with Darfur. This is the main provincial town in the east, and home to not just our hosts the UNHCR, but main offices of just about every big aid charity working here – Oxfam, Care International, MSF etc..

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Mt. Toubkal National Park, Morocco

SPANA has been working with the Department Des Eaux et Forets (a sort of wildlife and forestry Ministry) in Morocco for many years. I think it would be fair to say it has not always been an easy relationship. Something like that between Ken Livingstone and the Conservative Party would sum it up nicely.
Because we have built environmental education exhibitions in some of our refuges, as well as producing booklets and posters on endangered birds and mammals, we are seen by them to be the experts.

Sometimes I wish we weren’t.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually agreed to design and build an exhibition about the animals, people and natural environment of Toubkal National Park in the High Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. This is to be in the currently empty building, titled ‘Eco Museum’, near Asni, a village on the hill road leading right into the heart of the mountains.
From there you can see mighty Mt Toubkal, 4,167 metres high, towering up into the piercing blue sky. The Berber hill people of the region call it Adrar N’dern, ‘Mountain of Mountains’ and retain a very healthy respect for the changeability and often violence of the weather - freezing snow-storms in winter, baking sun and desiccating winds in summer.
Anything living in the mountains has got to be tough; the plants, animals and of course the people. Which brings us to SPANA’s particular interest in the region. The villagers, depend absolutely on the toughness and resilience of that most wondrous creature – the mule.

Created by mating a donkey stallion to a horse mare, this remarkable creature has had more than its share of bad publicity, and a certain mythology has grown up around it. ‘Stubborn as a mule’, ’Mule headed’ – all denigrating a truly amazing animal.
Yet it was actually the mule that conquered the American West. It was mules, not horses, that pulled the prairie schooners. And it was mules that carried the forty-niners up into the Yukon and Alaska. The British Army had whole mountain brigades equipped with mules, complete with artillery specially designed to be packed on them. The Chindits in the Burmese jungle depended on them, and many a sick or wounded soldier owed their life to the hardiness and stamina of the good old army mule.

So SPANA has been only too pleased to provide veterinary care for the mules of the High Atlas – we’ve even built a little clinic in the village of Imlil (right at the foot of Mt. Toubkal) where every month the mobile vet team visit from Marrakech.

Every family depends on these mules for their very existence. Not only are they used in agriculture to plough and carry crops and water and firewood, many villagers are also mountain guides, and their mules carry supplies up to the mountain refuges, as well as tourists’ baggage, and more than occasionally, the odd tourist themselves.
So it seemed essential that mules should feature strongly in the exhibition, and last weekend we trekked into the heart of the mountains to get film and photos of the mules, their owners and the way of life in some of the remotest mountain villages.

It was absolutely stunning. Not only the spectacular landscapes – bleak, brown, barren summits soaring into the cobalt blue of the sky, with viridian valley bottoms crammed with fruit-trees and narrow terraces of maize and barley. The villages cling to the steep valley sides – any flat piece of earth is at a premium – so they seem a jumble of flat roofed layers, storey upon storey with little windows guarded by traditional wrought-iron grills.

The people who still struggle to wrest a living from this hard and hostile land are like their animals in many ways – tough and hardy, nimble and sure-footed, yet gentle and hospitable. It is a great joy and privilege to live amongst them for a little while, sharing their lives, their trials and tribulations, in fact stepping back into another, largely vanished world.

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