Writing this sitting in Frankfurt Airport. It’s five o’clock in the morning – just arrived from Amman, Jordan. My eyes feel like someone’s been pouring sand into the sockets, and my mouth has been a testing ground for a glue factory. But it’s reassuring to know that Germans are just as incompetent at running airports as the British.
We actually started out, via another overnight flight, landing at 4.30am in Cairo last Friday. I’m not a big fan of conferences, but I know, I’m a dinosaur, everyone tells me, and I must enjoy the networking opportunities and long-winded, jargon filled speeches. Yes, and it is, truly, a chance to meet up with old friends.
Then on Sunday we left for Amman in Jordan, and the Egyptians airport authorities are right up there fighting for the last place in the competence stakes. Cases lost or broken, flights over-booked, long delays with no information. Oh. Joy.
But it’s all quickly forgotten as we drive down to Petra. We are getting lots of complaints from tourists about the treatment of animals provided by the local Bedouin for the tourists. These are getting worse and worse as no-one seems in control or willing to enforce the bye-laws.
Riding horses are raced up and down the tourist tracks at breakneck speed as teenage riders show off their macho inferiority complexes to the visitors who at the same time they envy and despise. Saddle and girth sores, with swollen and skinned joints attest to the indifference of their owners.
There are a few carts for carrying tourists too fat or lazy to make the mile-long walk through the rock-cleft to the fabulous ‘Treasury’ at the start of Petra proper. These carts are whipped-up mercilessly, soaked in sweat, as they race back up the hill to the entrance gates with their grinning passengers - the soonest back get another load.
And once past the treasury, children hawk their donkeys to carry fat visitors up a thousand or more steps to ‘the Monastery’, for a stunning view across the whole ruined city. Why can’t they just walk up?(And the vista seems even better for the little bit of effort involved.) Clearly, donkeys were never designed to carry the huge American lady we watched, as the little creature struggled to carry her. I wonder how much Mary weighed when she road down to Bethlehem. Not a hundred and twenty kilos, I bet! Depressingly little SPANA can do as we don’t have a project in the area, and it’s a hundred and fifty miles from Amman.
Still, apart from that, it’s impossible to visit Petra without being almost overwhelmed by the whole place – the sheer enormity of the task the Nabateans took on – carving whole cliff-faces into temples and tombs. And the colours. Pink, red, purple, ochre – hard to describe it as the sun moves and changes the light and tones. Let’s just leave it as unique and unforgettable. Certainly something everyone should try ‘to see before they die’.
After all that a good night’s sleep would have been welcome. Instead, the Saudis in the room next door threw an all-night party, with girls and Black Label – after all that’s what they come to Amman for, but it was too much for us, and finally at four in the morning we admitted defeat and moved rooms, two floors up. Could still hear the singing and screaming – what on earth could they be doing in there?
Then for our sins, in the morning it was over to the SPANA clinic in Wadi Al-Seer to spend a happy few hours fighting over the budget.
Then via the Education Centre – amazing how tiny saplings grow in a desert when you chuck on a bit of water now and again, and down the long hill to the clinic in the Jordan valley. There we treat the animals of the field workers who toil amongst the little plots of strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes and other winter goods – doubtless heading for Europe – but also the donkeys and livestock of the Bedouin shepherds who bring their flocks down from the freezing hills into the warmer valley – and watch over them diligently.
As we climbed back up the steep road to Amman in the dusk, we could see the lights of Bethlehem twinkling away across the river in the distance.
Happy Christmas.
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Our illustrious chairman, Derek Knottenbelt did a couple of training courses at our new Centre in Casablanca – what a difference the greening grass and trees that we planted in the spring makes. It was great to watch this all-consuming teacher inspire our technicians with his enthusiasm and skill. Although watching him clean an abscess in a horse’s eye, with a tiny hooked needle, sent little shivers of horror down through my stomach, it was soon time to leave the delights of a wintry Morocco, and head for our next rendez-vous, in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Air Mauritanie (motto: ‘It’s always Ramadan with Air Mauritanie’), has gone belly up. Huge unpaid bills for aviation fuel all over the place. So, it’s back to good old Royal Air Maroc. But why do they have to fly everywhere at three o’clock in the morning ?
So after a pretty grim three or four hours we decamp into the mighty Nouakchott International Airport at four am. Not great. Plus due to a general cock-up in the planning, there is not only no-one to meet us, we have no local money, and when we finally arrive in the very picturesque taxi, there are no rooms in the hotel. Well, to cut a long story short, with a mixture of cajoling and bullying, we eventually found a few rooms spread around the town and crawled thankfully into bed.
Nouakchott is the city where we are working with the fifty thousand donkeys that get the Whatsit beaten out of them as they haul barrels of water around the town. Not easy. The youngsters that work them come from some of the poorest stratas of society on earth. But it’s not good to be a donkey worked by youngsters – who take out all their frustrations, angst and testosterone on their wretched charges.
( There’s a local proverb, the donkey says – ‘if children go to heaven, I don’t want to go there’).
So we’re running a major campaign to try and change things – we’ve done a harness course to make thousands of cheap head collars and reins – so the drivers don’t have to beat them round the head to steer them – and a bit of ‘PR’ in the form of a TV sketch, where the kids play football and compare it to their work ,and (hopefully) football stars tell them it isn’t cool to knock seven bells out of your animals. Oh, plus the usual stuff of competitions and prizes for best donk, prettiest animal, best team etc. Nothing like a bit of bribery.
But sometimes you wonder if those donkeys know whose side we’re on. We’re out at one of the water points with the mobile clinic, treating wounds, trimming feet, fitting the (free!) comfy head collars, when Whammo ! One of the little so-and-sos bites off the tip of our vet’s finger.
Understandably a bit ashen-faced, he’s helped into the Landrover.
‘Did anyone pick up my finger ?’ he asks plaintively.
I didn’t like to tell him I think the donk ate it.
Shiver.
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This is the time of year when we try to visit all the countries – and battle with them over next year’s budget, and what we ought to try and achieve. And it really is a battle – blood in the snow. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, North Africa and the Middle East is often freezing cold at this time of the year. Literally, snow.
A couple of years ago, in the week before Christmas, we were working with Bedouin sheep flocks in the hills above the Jordan valley. The ‘leader’ of the flock is always a donkey, and the ewes follow him devotedly from grazing to grazing. We were worming rural donkeys and vaccinating the sheep-dogs. We came across this flock and its donkey, with three shepherds in traditional gear, two of them holding new-born lambs, with the snow-covered hills behind stretching away to Beith-el- heim across the valley. All it needed was a big, bright star.
Hardly a whisper of change in two thousand years.
The shepherds were gentle, kind and welcoming - it was probably the most moving ‘Christmas Card’ I’ve ever seen.
Last week we were in Morocco, our biggest project – we’ve got nine vet. hospitals there, to try and cope with the two and a half million working animals – not to count the dogs and cats – many of them abandoned – that find their way into our centres. We spend nearly a million pounds a year there, so there is a lot of work to do to ensure that we get best value for money. It takes a whole day, arguing over what price fodder will be next year (will there be a drought?), will fuel still go up at twenty per cent per year, and can we make that pick-up truck last out another year?
But at least it provides a little spare time. Time to go and visit Sidi Boughaba, - the coastal bird sanctuary we run. We ship urban kids in by bus, (over 120,000 so far), where they get an intensive day of ‘nature’ in the raw. From pond-dipping and identifying bugs down a microscope, to woodland walks spotting fungi and butterflies, to standing watching spellbound as the Marsh Harriers swoop and dive above their heads.
I always think these fabulous birds are the stars of the reserve – in December the twenty eight or so individuals are already sparring, to secure a mate and a breeding site. But in spring, if you’re really lucky, you can sometimes watch the males ‘tumbling’, calling up their mates from their nests in the reed-beds and throwing a nice tasty rat or something at them, which is caught in mid-air, then mum drops back down onto the nest. Not every girl’s idea of romantic courtship I suppose, but for Marsh harriers it works a treat.
It’s also a big deal that we have in the winter about a quarter of the entire world population of Marbled Teal – about twelve hundred individuals. It’s great to see them just sitting out on the lake kipping quietly.
Which was not what happened to us when we went to Mauritania.
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