This is my friend Bounkita - named after the donkey character in one of the children's reading books we use here.
He was also an orphan foal, so all in all, in a country like Morocco, he's a pretty lucky chap.
He earns his living as well, by being nice and gentle with all the kids who visit the SPANA refuge here in Rabat as part of the education proramme - 2300 children this year alone.
He's pretty important too. In the Arab/Moroccan culture here, everyone believes donkeys are stupid, lazy and ridiculous animals - so Bounkita gives them their first experience of a real live donkey. They just love him - and he enjoys showing them that all those stupid misconceptions are wrong.
Have you ever seen a donkey laugh?
Showing posts with label Donkey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donkey. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Bounkita
Monday, 20 September 2010
Return to Zimbabwe
I must admit it came as a pleasant surprise. The last time I came here, the price on the morning newspaper was six hundred and forty million dollars. Honestly. They’d just started printing a new set of bank notes, and the smallest was ten trillion dollars – which would just about have bought you a cup of tea – as long as the kettle took less than ten minutes to boil, prices were going up so quickly.
But this time it’s all changed. The official currencies are now the US dollar or the South African rand – and once again there is food in the shops and fuel in the garages (but only one pump working, obviously).
That doesn’t mean there isn’t still huge poverty – with massive unemployment, especially in the rural areas.
So our little welfare project around Bulawayo is still very much needed. The team travels around, sometimes huge distances, visiting villages or even stopping the carts on the roads, and giving basic veterinary care to the thousands of donkeys still working hard in the African sun.
Monday, 10 August 2009
Progress in Mali
We were away for the only nice week in June in Brit, and then we were in Ethiopia – rained every day, and now Mali. And guess what. Rainy season.
Deluges of the stuff. Flooding the streets and open sewers of Bamako, and running orange-brown torrents off the hills and down into the river
What a river it is too. Over half a mile wide in the city, the swirling pewter-grey mass of water sweeps under the two bridges where the traffic sits permanently gridlocked, belching out its evil clouds of diesel smoke into the damp grey air.
In the backstreets and slums, thousands of little beige donkeys battle to haul the piled-high two wheel carts that carry the city’s rubbish through the mud. Only a few of the main roads have tarmac.
These loads are carried to dumps around the city where the carts are tipped, and then owner and donkey set off for another load. Bizarrely, one of the biggest dumps, we were proudly told was twinned with Bordeaux.
The sad and angry young men who drive them, brutalised by their poverty and misery, wear Air France eye-shades as face masks against the stench and dirt. In summer they are dust bowls, now in the rainy season they’re rat infested, disease ridden swamps. Women and children, who actually live on the dumps, rake through each stinking, filthy load for whatever treasures they can find – God knows what that can be.
So we send our vet teams there, treating the harness wounds, cuts and sores that go with the job – but it’s harder to treat the malnutrition and fatigue – and in one of the paradoxes of Africa, the job has just got harder.
Someone decided that just tipping all the rubbish in the streets was not a good thing. It ought to be taken out and dumped in the poor benighted bush somewhere.
So it needs to go into trucks for the trip.
What a good idea. Even better, there are stacks of countries producing dumper trucks and loaders that they can’t shift at the moment. World wide recession and all that. Sell ‘em cheap to Mali. Keeps the export statistics up.
So now the donkey carts have to struggle up a steep ramp in order to tip into a skip. That last slope is often the final straw for an exhausted animal. If the balance on the cart is wrong sometimes the wretched creature is jack-knifed into the air and left hanging in the traces.
But there’s worse. Because of course the trucks break down and there’s no money for spares – even if they existed. So everyone waits for hours in long queues for a truck that may never arrive. Then when everyone finally loses patience, they just tip the stuff out on the ground like the old days, and then shove off home.
Somebody at SPANA had the bright idea of welding a hinged leg onto one of the shafts. It can be dropped down while the animal is queuing to take the weight off the poor old donk’s back.
In Mali, that’s real progress.
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Ethiopia
Yup – freezing cold, peeing down with rain, electricity every second day – it must be July in Ethiopia. To be fair, they even call it their winter, but nothing quite prepares you for the sheer misery of it all.
The mighty Hotel Tommy in Debre Zeit, where we have just spent a luxurious week, doesn’t do hot water, and doesn’t even attempt breakfast on those days when electricity doesn’t make it down the grid.
So we just have to wait ‘til lunchtime for the next portion of Injura. Now there’s something pretty special. It’s the only thing the locals really love. They eat it for breakfast, they eat it for lunch, they eat it for tea. And if at any time they’re feeling a little bit peckish, the cry goes out “Why don’t we just have a little bit of that delicious Injura?”
The only way I can think of describing it to the uninitiated, is to imagine a cold, wet washing-up cloth, rolled up like a Swiss roll. And if you’re rich, you dollop a blob of meat sauce on it, or some raw mince. Mmmm, yummy!
Now to prepare this gastronomic miracle, you have to have Teff.
Teff is a cereal unique to Ethiopia – just can’t imagine why it hasn’t caught on in the rest of the world – and must be one of the lowest yielding and unproductive crops in the history of the world. It yields about ten per cent of what any other crop would do. And to get it in the ground, you plough the field six times with a maresha plough - SIX BLOOMING TIMES!
You do this with a team of oxen, or if they’ve given up the ghost, a couple of donkeys. I suppose that’s where we come in.
There are still something like eight million working animals in the place – though God knows noone’s ever really counted the teaming masses of donkeys – there’s probably twice as many.
These can be seen streaming along the roads into any of the towns, carrying loads of dried cow-pats. They use them for their fires to cook the blinking injura. Amazingly, a farmer with a cow can make more money selling the cow-pats than the milk.
But we’re really more concerned with the horses.
Donks are so tough and resilient, that given even the slightest chance, even just a sniff at a bit of feed, they will cope. They are the hardiest, most stoical creatures on the planet – they need to be.
But with horses, it’s a different ball-game. In the same conditions – poor food, endless work, pitiless heat in the summer, and wet and cold during the winter - horses really don’t cut the mustard.
So that’s what we do. Endlessly. We take a mobile clinic every day to one of the towns in central and southern Ethiopia, and try and help the endless queues of taxi and cart horses waiting for us.
What a job. Not only are most of them skin and bone – they’re covered in scabs and fly-blown harness sores, lame on as many feet as you can see, and a fair number will have an eye missing or a tooth abscess. What a crew.
Then there’s epizootic lymphangitis. This is where flies carry the infection onto an open wound and it gradually develops down the lymph tracks, until the poor wretched creature is a mass of suppurating boils and sores, and abandoned to die beside the road. Lovely.
Yet, when you look at their owners – wizened, starving looking things themselves, that don’t look as if they’ve got the strength to lift a cup of tea, it’s easier to understand. Poverty in their homes and children like I’ve never seen before.
And some of the kindest, gentlest people in the world.
What a country. I just love it.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 1 June 2009
Life is a Big Beach in Tunisia
Well, there you go – airborne at last, and homeward bound on the mighty Tunis Air flight 790 – only an hour or so late, but hey, who’s complaining.
Morocco and Tunisia both do a really great line in bored, ‘I was meant for much greater things than this’ young ladies, who, in between yawns, replied vacantly to my enquiries as to why we were late, “Dix minutes en retard”. ("Ten Minutes late..")
Three times.
But as I said, who’s complaining. I certainly didn’t when we turned up at the hotel in Beija, with a fax confirming our reservation, to be told that the hotel was completely full, and they knew nothing of our reservation.
And when we’d finally found a couple of rooms in a dodgy looking ‘bar’ – with lots of strangely-painted girls, looking around them hopefully whilst talking into their mobiles – the shower attatchment in the bath was one of those that refused to be ever turned off, so when switched on, turned into a leaping, soaking, serpent of a thing thrashing around the walls. No matter I said.
The sun was still shining, and the ‘restaurant’ where we ate was showing Manchester United being thrashed by Barcelona. In Arabic. The place was packed of course, so we were given the only available space, right underneath the telly, and spent the next hour with the slightly strange sensation of having a hundred or so chain-smoking Tunisians apparently staring at us, and shrieking whenever Barcelona looked like scoring a goal. Perhaps they’d just put big money on Man Utd to win, or had bought one of their shirts. There are a lot of them about, hanging forlornly in the tourist-tat shops.
Finally, we ended up in the deep south – just on the edge of the beach there. Well, it’s a pretty major beach – stretching about two thousand miles due south to Timbuctou.
We treat the animals in the surrounding oasis – including the donkeys that get dental caries from eating too many dates, and of course the camels that get rolled out for the tourists that rock up here for their ‘desert expeience’.
As we were treating a group of complaining camels for sarcoptic mange - not surprisingly they don’t take injections very kindly – a bunch of French tourists arrived.
All are swathed in Arab cloaks and turban-like headscarves – giving a somewhat incongruous appearance with their trainers and shorts underneath, and the ‘shades’ cigarettes and cans of diet coke. Very cool. The fat ones have to be pushed and shoved into the camel saddles, and then they’re off, lurching into the distance on their ‘one-hour camel-trek’.But we’ve treated over a hundred animals, and visited villages and hamlets in ‘La Tunisie Profonde’. So, as I said, who’s complaining?
Well, perhaps the pretty little chestnut mare who had panicked the night before and kicked a disc plough, severing all the tendons and nerves of her rear, right leg.
Nothing we can do for her, we told the owner.
He just stood with the tears streaming down over his cheeks.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 18 May 2009
Back to Morocco
Spending a week in Morocco once again confirms why I love the place for its quirkiness – but also why it can drive people absolutely crazy.
We came for a host of reasons, which involved driving practically the length and breadth of the country – visiting SPANA’s most northerly, and southerly clinics.
Now, anyone who has had any doings with Morocco’s roads, and the unusual style and driving skills of its drivers, will confirm that it is an interesting experience.
I mean, call me old fashioned if you will, but would you expect vehicles, including mule and donkey drawn carts to regularly approach you coming the wrong way down the motorway, passing our astonished stares with nothing more than a cheery waive?
Or to see sheep and cows grazing on the central reservation – after all you wouldn’t want to waste all that lovely grass.
And if you happen to live on the other side of the main (very busy) Casablanca/Rabat motorway , what could possibly be more normal than a mother dispatching her children to run across, dodging the juggernauts, to get to the school on the other side?
But then, you drive down the Casablanca Avenue in Marrakech – it’s mid May – and the Jacarandas lining each side of the street are in their full glory. They create a thick haze of cobalt blue stretching into the far distance.
As we pass a bloke is painting the walls of a house and spills half the paint across the pavement. He doesn’t even notice.
Going up into the mountains the Tamarisk trees are also in full flower, and just for once, after exceptional rains this year, cattle and sheep are lying contentedly it their dappled shade, chewing the cud.
Even the poor old broken-down horses, mules and donkeys waiting stoically in our hospital in Marrakech look a little bit better than normal. Their owners ask pathetically for our help, but sadly there is no miracle injection we can give to make these animals young again.
But we do what we can – especially to try and ease the pain of old wounds and injuries. In that respect, I feel a certain kinship with them. I know old wounds and injuries I thought long since healed, come back to haunt us as we age. At least I feel I can look the trudging, loaded donkeys in the eye now, after trudging myself round the Marathon. And I only had to do it once – and then had to spend a week nursing the blisters.
Still, it did make an impression on the people. They now know that the English are completely mad – shaking their heads in disbelief at the photos of the three of us in our donkey outfits.
But we raised over two thousand pounds at a fundraiser in Tangier, and at the AGM in Rabat last night, people stood to applaud the donors of SPANA in Britain for their generosity.
So, who cares about their unusual driving habits?
Jeremy Hulme
Friday, 23 January 2009
Zimbabwe
The flight to Zimbabwe is long and hard – not made any easier by sharing the London / Johannesburg stretch with what appeared to be an Afrikaner Rugby Club reunion dinner and booze up. Several chaps, with very little neck, in khaki shirts and shorts, drank and sang and squabbled their way throughout the eleven hours – one even deciding he needed to change his clothes in the aisle halfway through. Then there’s a charming five hour wait in the airport for the flight to Bulawayo.
Finally arriving at the ‘temporary’ Joshua Nkomo Airport Terminal (the new one has rested, unfinished and unloved, swathed in scaffolding – which is gradually being stolen – for the last ten years), it is a shock to be ushered into the customs and immigration hall by smiling customs officers, asking whether we have slept well, and whether we are enjoying our visit.
Now, say what you like, but the Zim economy is a basket case. The day we arrived the Government issued a new set of bank notes – ten to fifty trillion dollar bills. The morning paper costs six hundred million dollars. Now even our own dear Gordon Brown doesn’t have problems like that.
Though come to think of it, the two Supreme Leaders do have quite a lot in common: both unelected, both in charge of collapsed economies, both arrest opposition MPs and neither have got much of a sense of humour.
And by God you need a sense of humour to survive in Zim. It’s hard to believe, but the people are unfailingly polite and cheerful, gentle and optimistic.
There’s 92% unemployment, bread and meat queues outside the few shops that have anything to sell – most are closed and boarded up. And everyone gently reminds you not to drink the water – “We don’t want you to catch cholera” – it’s rampant in the countryside, where perversely, the much needed rains also wash sewage into the streams and rivers used for drinking.
The hospitals have no drugs or equipment, and the schools are on strike, probably because the teachers’ pay – in Zim dollars – no longer even pretends to put food in their families’ mouths.
Yet they stay cheerful.
Someone quips: “There are so many potholes in the Bulawayo roads, it’s the only town in the world where the police arrest you for drink-driving if they see you driving straight".
So it’s a little miracle to see the SPANA funded Donkey Protection Trust out every day on the roads around town and in the surrounding countryside, gently treating the animals that pull the carts that now service the region’s economy – whatever little that might be.
We went north to Gueru to meet two brave young vets, Keith and Lisa, also trying to help the donkeys of the struggling people up there. They also happen to be wild-life specialists – many of the game parks and reserves are being decimated by hungry poachers.
Before we had fully grasped the severity of the situation we had been recruited to help them dart and immobilise about ten fully grown lions. Somehow that Pope fellow got himself the safer end, sticking a thermometer up the unmentionables, while poor little me got the sharp end. Literally. I had to open the jaws of recumbent lions, draw out their tongues, slip an electronic sensor on the end, and try to concentrate on the readings (blood oxygen level and pulse rate), while Lisa kept asking disquieting questions, like “Is he coming round yet?”.
I can tell you, when he started growling, I “came round” pretty blooming quickly. I went out through the gate like a whippet.
I wish I could be as nifty in that blessed marathon.
Jeremy Hulme
Friday, 7 November 2008
Next Stop - Mali and Mauritania
Sitting here in the rather charming departure ‘lounge’ of Nouakchott International Airport, Mauritania. There is no attempt at ‘duty free’ – they don’t do booze in Mauritania – except, whisper it not, we found a restaurant (the Salamander, if you’re ever stuck here and looking for somewhere really trendy), that somehow manages to produce beer, and even a little wine – in unmarked bottles.
There is also no air-conditioning, and even though it’s now ten pm, the sun blazing all day on the corrugated tin roof has produced a warmish, somewhat intimate, atmosphere. Of course there is also no attempt at a café or even soft-drinks – probably a good thing , as I’m keen to avoid visiting the rather interesting toilet system – of infamous repute from many earlier visits.
Just as well really, as last week’s visit to Chad and the food there, left a lasting souvenir, let’s just call it a ten-day dieting opportunity. Nice to be going home at last – overnight of course – hitting my beloved Charles De Gaulle airport at five o’clock tomorrow morning, where I believe they are (surprisingly) on strike anyway.
Ah, the joys of flying with Air France.
Because of the little bit of a misunderstanding here a couple of months ago (a coup d’etat – the newly ex-President now resting in chokey), all overseas aid – EU, World Bank, etc has been suspended, and all NGOs have pulled out and gone home.
Except for SPANA, of course.
In fact we’re doing rather well, although I say it myself.
We have a clinic and a mobile team trying to help the sixty thousand plus donkeys (and a few half-crippled horses) that deliver water round the city (they forgot to put in water pipes and drainage when they built the place after independence, fifty-odd years ago).
It’s hardly a well-paid job, as you might imagine – the youngsters who slave over this (and some are still, truly, slaves), live in almost indescribable squalor and misery. The donks are fed a mixture of torn-up cardboard and millet meal.
Recently we’ve been making (locally) a simple set of headcollar and reins and dishing them out free, (over six thousand so far), as up to now they’ve just steered the poor wretched creatures by beating them on one side of the head or other. What a mess of wounds and sores that caused.
So, after a year, it was nice to see a real difference.
Talking of differences, before here I was doing the budget in Mali – but also had time to visit the little ‘Riding for the Handicapped’ centre we run there. Don’t even think of asking how we got into it – but it is fantastic. Generally, children born damaged or handicapped in any way are abandoned. In the countryside many just die, but in Bamako they end up in one of the ‘Orphanages’.
They are fed and watered, but that’s about it. No school – no treatment.
We can help about twenty five of the wee scraps, who come three mornings a week, and ride around a sand-filled yard on two bomb-proof horses. There is also a physiotherapist, and we have toys and desks and paper and crayons, and they all just love it. Their faces light up when they get lifted onto the horse - suddenly they don’t have to look up at everything. It also makes a tremendous difference to their muscle control and co-ordination – after a year or so they’re almost unrecognisable.
But, I suppose due to the financial crisis, the partners we had in funding have pulled out (without warning). It’s not fair for SPANA to have to put in any extra – they’re doing enough already.
But if I can’t find some one or other to help out, I might well be having to tell them they can’t ride on the horses any more. We will have to stop making a difference for those few children.
Jeremy Hulme
Thursday, 31 July 2008
All Tuaregged Out
Finally got back from the desert this evening, and quite frankly I'm all Tuaregged out. We spent the weekend mucking about on camels, and my one - it actually goes by the rather catchy little moniker of Albajaz, did not respond to my overtures in quite the way I felt I could reasonably expect.
After a tolerably civilsed couple of days, I felt he let himself down at the end, by trying to bite me.
I have to say I was disappointed. Only my lightning reactions saved the day. Perhaps he was upset at watching some of his pals receive Ivermectin injections - this despite the Tuareg declaring that injections were bad for you because they drained your strength. But tablets are acceptable, apparently.
At one well we stopped at, word must have gone ahead, and about forty donkeys seemed to materialise out of the sand. Their owners seemed to think it would be ok if they had injections, after all, they're only donkeys. One poor thing arrived with an ear half hanging off. The owner said it was a bite - Amadou said, looking at the cut, it was a bite by a knife. Anyway, after some deliberation, he decided to take the risk of doing field surgery - we'd already seen that the owner had tried to treat it with sump-oil, and sooner or later it was bound to catch on a stick or branch. So the SPANA team went into action. Lots of local anaesthetic, then a long time trying to clean up the mess, before extensive suturing leading to successfully removing the remains of the ear. Anti-biotics and painkillers, then he was up on his feet, and without so much as a thank you, was running off home. But a nice way to finish, before we had to saddle up the camels again.
Then yesterday is probably better glossed over. We started six hours late! Six hours!
I know they didn't want to do what we wanted to do - ie search for the elephants in the Gourma - but the Tuareg method of getting their own way is very frustrating, and exhausting. We had a stunning array of excuses given to us - the originality of which I haven't heard since school.
We had 'neighbours child was ill - had to be taken to hospital' and 'slight car accident - had to take car to police station', then 'couldn't find insurance papers' 'couldn't get any fuel, ice, water etc'. Finally, beaten and demoralized, we just headed off into the desert again - the only place they are truly happy. And I must say the stretch of rolling dunes we ended up in was very beautiful. So we had the campfire, cooked a meal aned then rolled up to sleep in our blankets.
Yes, of course you've guessed it. At four o'clock we were woken by a screaming gale, the sand streaming off the dunes, and hitting us like a sandblaster. But Chris was happy - he got wonderful film until the cameras seized up in protest at the sand-blasting - then we spent the rest of the night huddled in the 4x4 against the driven rain. And then of course the rain gave us problems the next morning, with all the nice flat plains - used as roadways - flooded. We had to dig the damn thing out seven times before we got to Goundam. Perhaps it was not helpful that our driver was much more at home on a camel than a 4x4. Still, we finally made it. And I've 'done' deserts for a bit, thank you very much. Tomorrow, we're off by canoe to see some of the river villages where we have para-vets. And it's the hippo breeding season. When they're at their testiest.
Jeremy Hulme
Thursday, 22 May 2008
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 2008 - Day 4
Helen Yemm has done wonders for us with her article in the Telegraph about SPANA and gardens and Marrakech. It was first printed on Monday. And now again today. Can’t ask for better PR than that!
But from the comments from passers-by, we were hoping for big things from the BBC website ‘Vote for your favourite Garden’ competition.
Now we hear they’ve abandoned it (for technical reasons) and are going to decide the winner themselves.
Well, there’s a surprise. Touch of the Blue Peters?
Still, it’s lovely and warm, and there are still thousands of people pouring past our little SPANA garden…….
Jeremy Hulme
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 2008 - Day 3
Don’t know whether I’m actually going to survive this. Last three days, from 6.30 in the morning ‘til eight or nine o’clock at night. But we’re getting some wonderful publicity and a chance to recruit hundreds of new members.
We were even invited to have lunch with The Great and The Good of the RHS – so perhaps they’re not too cross with us after all.
First bit of warm sunshine as well, which makes all the herbs in the garden – thyme, rosemary, lavender and mint - give off great wafts of intoxicating perfume.
Everybody says it reminds them of their holidays!
We can hardly keep up with the demand for our bags and leaflets – lovely coming home this evening watching a stream of SPANA bags heading for the Tube.
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 2008 - Day 2
Hurrah hurrah.
Breathless runners have just arrived from RHS headquarters - we’ve won a silver medal!!! Not bad for a bunch of amateurs like us! (OK,OK, so we did have a teeny-weeny bit of help from one or two people – Chris O’Donoghue, Helen Yemm and others too numerous to mention). Tee-hee, it’s jolly nice hearing about all the bruised egos in the mega-gardening world who haven’t won anything. We’re feeling rather smug.
It was also great when the Royal Party – out in force – arrived yesterday evening. Of course they all wanted to know why Emma was not there. The Queen also enjoyed the story of her magnificent horses falling madly in love with a humble donkey.
The crowds are just fantastic, thousands and thousands streaming past, all congratulating us and asking about SPANA – the whole point of the exercise after all - and to see thousands of our SPANA bags being carried around is just great.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 19 May 2008
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 2008 - Day 1
Ye Gods, can it only be Monday? Knackered already and it hasn’t started yet.
We spent all last week frantically building, painting and tiling. I must have done two days on my hands and knees laying tiles and then grouting them – without getting any spots of cement or dirt on them. Tiles now OK, knees need replacement.
The plants came on Thursday – including an olive tree we’re hiring just for the week.
I must say it looks pretty good – the fountain from Marrakech despite weighing half a ton made it safely, and is even working – a miracle!
Last night we arrived at Knightsbridge barracks with Emma, our little donkey from our Trustee, Carl Boyd’s farm in Chertsey.
The Blues and Royals had arranged a nice comfy stall for her, but we had reckoned without the hormones in the troop horses. They all fell immediately head over heels in love with her. Silver Stick (the Grand Fromage of the Household Cavalry), and the Commanding Officer both had their huge chargers (17 hands or I’m a Dutchman), stabled just across the corridor. They became completely besotted with Emma, who just played hard to get. These great big softies spent the whole night stomping up and down, yelling and calling out to all and sundry. Nobody got any sleep, except Emma. Or did she? We will never know!
Next morning, she inspected the Queen’s Guard mounting in the Barracks Forecourt, before riding out to Whitehall. Great pictures – especially one with a trooper on a huge black mount who is looking down with horror and amazement at this strange looking thing standing beside him. Of course there were lots of cracks from the boys about Gordon Brown’s defence cuts, and the new cavalry mounts etc etc.
Now it’s Monday afternoon, freezing cold – the judges have been and gone – Clare Balding (very nice, very complementary about SPANA) and the BBC also.
Sadly, it was decided that Emma had not got security clearance, so would have to go, before HRH and the Royal Party arrive.
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
A New Chapter in China
Writing this at about thirty-five thousand feet on the good old BA flight back from Beijing to London (Good old BA cancelled the flight out at one hour’s notice ‘cabin-crew shortage’). Hard to really describe the place, it’s so immense – it takes four hours just to fly up to Urumqi where we’re starting this project (with good old WSPA funding it).
But it’s the strange mixture of the very old, traditional, and the very new. You’ve only got to see the sexy new Airport Terminal – Norman Foster design – state of the art technology etc, two English-speaking 'meet and greeters’ for every passenger, to be stunned by the speed and progress of China’s ‘economic miracle’.
Yet, in the deep and distant countryside around Xinjiang people still rely on donkeys for their transport. And one of the pony herders, and I have to be honest, they’re really proud of their animals, still thinks the only way to cure sand colic is by slitting their nostrils and bleeding them. So how do you square the two different worlds? And those ponies!
Tough and hardy, their black manes and tails streaming in the biting wind – I felt as if I’d forgotten to put any clothes on. Yet with their thick brown coats and black furry legs they were ideally suited to the place. Some of them had the mealy noses – just like our Exmoor and Fell ponies. I wonder if there could be any connection. Ghengis Khan must have ridden ponies like these and he got right into Europe. It’s not impossible, is it? Or maybe some Crusader or silk and spice trader, could have taken ponies from England, and sold them to traders on the Silk Road?
Talking of ancient breeds, this is also the home of the Kiang or Mongolian Wild Ass –ancient ancestor of our patient donkeys (tho’ people argue which wild ass was domesticated first),. They’re as rare as hen’s teeth now of course – I’d give a lot to see one in the wild - but they’re nervous flighty creatures and hard to find. No wonder when everyman’s hand has been against them for so long.
So now we’re heading home.
But I can certainly say I won’t miss jelly fish and fish-heads - the welcome and hospitality is humbling – but please, not for breakfast!
Oh, what fun. The Captain has just come along and stopped all the films – apoplectic with rage – smoke coming out of his ears. Apparently some naughty naughty boy has been smoking in the bogs – the ultimate sin. And if he catches the miscreant he’s going to have him arrested.
Just like me at school a million years ago.
Well that’s better than the naughty separatists caught on the South China Airways
Plane from Urumqi to Beijing last week – the day after us. They got lead injections.
Surely they can’t have been smoking in the loos?
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
The SPANA Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show
It’s sometimes a bit depressing for us mere mortals when confronted with real experts.
So it was when award-winning garden designer Chris O’Donoghue and international gardening writer Helen Yemm came out with me to Marrakech last week.
You may have read in SPANA News that we were lucky enough to ‘win’ the opportunity of creating and building a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in May this year.
I have to admit, that it was largely through Chris’s expertise and previous success at the show, that we were able to convince the organisers to take a gamble and let us have a go.
It will be based on the idea that animals, plants and humans are all interdependent –so we’re building a Moroccan courtyard garden, complete with fountain, stable, donkey cart, pots of nice smelly herbs, vines, etc etc. Of course it’s all a bit of a fiction – most Moroccan courtyards or riadhs have been bought up by trendy Islington types and turned into chi-chi little hotels or second homes.
But the idea is right, and I thought it would be fun to do. That is until the dread day draws near, and we are actually expected to put together a smart, professional garden, with more than a little of the ‘wow!’ factor.
Absolutely terrifying.
Hence the visit to Marrakech with Chris and Helen checking things out, and Hamid (our director in Morocco, who also fancies himself as a bit of a gardener) and I staring gormlessly at them as they argued about the ‘architectural structure’ and ‘intrinsic purity and vibrance of colour’ of this or that particular plant.
Of course it also gave us the chance to organise a fountain, donkey cart and harness, old window-frames, pots and tiles etc – so fingers crossed, with a bit of luck, and the afore-mentioned expert help we’ll have a garden to attract potential SPANA supporters.
Oh, I nearly forgot. We’re also having a live donkey – after all it is SPANA.
And the Queen visits on the first day. So, if you read the headlines the following day : ‘DONKEY BITES QUEEN – CHIEF EXEC THROWN INTO TOWER OF LONDON’ - have a bit of sympathy – come and throw me a stale crust of bread now and again.
Jeremy Hulme
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
From the Pyramids to Petra
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.
Monday, 17 December 2007
Fingerless in Mauritania
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.
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Novotel Hotel, Ndjamena (sometimes it's better to travel than arrive, and sometimes not)
We have had some problems connecting to the internet since the last posting, so here is Jeremy’s blog from Thursday to be followed by mine: 
Ah, the joys of travel in Africa. Yesterday we flew down south to Goz Beida – where there are not only huge refugee camps, but also thousands and thousands of ‘Internally Displaced Persons’, but because they are actually Chadians – who have been attacked by goodness knows who, they do not qualify for help from most of the major aid agencies. (If all that isn’t confusing enough, there are actually Chadian refugees who’ve fled over the border into Sudan and set up camps in Darfur. Beat that!)
We stayed with Oxfam, who are heavily involved in the refugee camps, providing tents, sanitation, water, - even healthcare. Of course they are heavily funded by the British Government to do all that, but they do do a good job.
However, after we’d visited the refugee camp, we asked to go and see one of the IDP camps – and that was a very different story.
In Kouroukan camp, they have about twelve thousand people, but not much else – oh, except thousands of donkeys. And they looked awful. We did a quick survey, and over fifty per cent were emaciated, yet the women were relying on them to carry food and water back from the ration distribution points. We spent the rest of the evening working out a project to take blood and faecal samples, and then worm the five thousand or so donkeys in the camp.
So, then we come to the interesting travel arrangements for today. After speaking to the local vet, who interestingly, had absolutely no equipment or medicines, we set out to visit a local village – knowing we had to be back at the airstrip for the flight back to Abeche at midday. An hour later, we were still motoring through the bush when I realised we were never going to get to the village in time. It then turned out this village had been chosen just to give someone a lift home. So, I’m afraid he was deposited by the roadside, with tearful farewells, while we turned round and started to race back to Goz Beida.
Then it all started to go a little wrong. Bang! The front wheel fell off.
So we abandoned the vehicle and started to walk back through the bush.
You meet such interesting people on the road – like the pick-up truck full of JEM rebels, with a heavy machine-gun on the cab roof, and rocket grenades strapped to the sides. Perhaps we should have realised something was a bit odd.
We finally got picked up by an Oxfam vehicle, and made it out to the airport a mere ten minutes too late. We talked to the Government troops guarding the air-strip (actually sleeping in the shade under the thorn trees), who said with some glee, that one plane had gone already – but they hadn’t seen one for a few hours. So we thought we’d wait a bit. Then we started to hear garbled messages over the radio that all the flights that afternoon had been cancelled. Merde. We agreed we might as well go back to the camp – and as we drove off we passed another truck-load of soldiers coming in, and waving cheerily at us, ‘Oh, changing the guards. That’s pretty well organised’ I thought.
Only this really WAS changing the guard – they were actually rebel troops seizing the airfield. So, panic stations back in Goz Beida, but we heard the errant planes were actually going to another airstrip about forty miles away through thick bush, and if we could make that by two-ish we might still get on a plane.
So a veiled and turbaned youngster, who obviously felt he was talented enough for Formula One, then drove us at breakneck speed along rutted tracks, missing trees by a hairsbreadth. Some church missionary people in the back started praying, which I’ve never felt is a good sign, or very confidence building.
But somehow we made it – and apart from the little problem of not being on the passenger manifest, we climbed gratefully into the little twin-engined DH Otter, and headed back to Abeche.
As I said, what fun it is travelling in Chad.
Sunday, 30 September 2007
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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