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
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Ethiopia
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
Friday, 19 September 2008
Tunisia
And if you want to know why there is a picture of an Ostrich here, you'll just have to read on...!
Hate to say anything good about Air France, but we actually managed to stage through Paris and arrived in Tunis, more or less on time, and with nearly all our luggage. There is now no way you can fly anywhere in North or West Africa by British Airways – really thoughtful business strategy that – for example now there’s three planefulls of Brits every day, direct to Marrakech, and Willie Walsh doesn’t think there’s any money in that.
From the man who organised the flawless opening of Terminal Five? Well, anyway, there it is, so Air France it has to be.
And Tunis is still 35 degrees even in the night, and of course deep into Ramadan, just to remind any non-muslims, that means not eating or drinking during the hours of daylight. Not drinking, even when it’s forty degrees plus at mid-day. So a certain degree of discomfort for all and sundry.
After doing the budget, and visiting the Education Bus – entertaining (and at the same time teaching) kids at the cultural centre in town during the summer holidays, we set off on the road north-east to Bou-salem.
This is the road the British Army fought its way down against the Deutsche Afrika Korps. All along the road are little green signs indicating Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries.
Immaculately kept, they chart the battles against General Von Arnim and the heavy price that had to be paid in young men’s lives. There are many graves of Black Watch soldiers, my old outfit, all the more tragic by the simple inscriptions on the plain stones - ‘Our only child’, ‘Farewell Daddy’, or ‘Aged 18 years’. And all killed in the last days of April and early May 1943 – it was all over on May the 8th.
Now, they really did have a degree of discomfort.
All a bit humbling and deflating as we continued visiting our three centres in the country. Bou-salem in the north, Kasserine in the dry, bleak middle, and Kebili down on the edge of the Sahara in the south.
We built a little hospital there in the sand of the palmerie – just half a dozen stables, and a classroom over the top of the surgery. And a pond of course – and boy, you should see the colours of the dragonflies. Oh, I nearly forgot, two ostriches as well. And before you ask, no, I’ve no idea how we end up with two ostriches. But I bet the eggs make a hell of a big omelette.
What a place this is. In the hotel we stay in in Douz, a village about ten miles further south, you look out of the window, across a little road, and that’s it. Sand. Miles and miles and miles of it. About two thousand in fact, of wonderful, rolling dunes before you hit the Niger River (remember that?) on the other side. Some beach.
And lots and lots of camels.
But of course all this comes at a price. Tourists. Thousands of them.
Working with the mobile clinic amongst the camels (mostly treating them for mange), we watch as streams of tourists – usually Italian or French, stream by for their ‘desert experience’. They appear to have to wear a brightly coloured tea-towel wrapped around their heads, and a stripy sort of cloak thing - makes them look like convicts on a chain gang. One can only imagine it’s meant to make them look like some kind of Arab warrior. But as most of them are fat, wearing trainers, baseball caps (yes, under the tea-towel), and smoking or chewing gum – it somewhat fails to capture the desired romance and mystery.
Oh, what a piece of work is man!
Jeremy Hulme
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Morocco - the good and bad
Perhaps I just don’t have much imagination, but when I’m standing shivering on Witham Station waiting for the 7.15 train on a winter’s morning, in the freezing drizzle and numbing wind, wondering if perhaps I’ve forgotten to put any clothes on, frankly it’s hard to believe that not everybody else is suffering the same fate.
So it’s quite depressing (probably even more so for you people reading this rubbish), to arrive in Marrakech last Friday and find that not everywhere is like Witham Station in January. Sorry to have to report, but the sun was shining, it was lovely and warm - people were even swimming. Not Witham Station at all really.
Of course that’s not quite true, because thanks to good old British Airways, we were four hours late, so didn’t actually arrive until one o’clock in the morning. But when we surfaced the next day and drew back the curtains, the sun was streaming into the room, and I was cursing the fact that I’d brought nothing but thick jumpers and heavy coats. Still, mustn’t complain, and I can assure, it really IS lovely to be surprised by warm sunshine in January.
So, having made you all jealous, let me remind you of some of the downsides of all this. The bad bits. Well, Saturday morning we went to the SPANA refuge (Good).
Queuing for treatment were about thirty horses, mules and donkeys, most of them looking like something out of a horror film (Bad).
But nice to see them helping themselves to a long soothing drink of cold, clean water (Good), from the huge water trough just by the entrance. Remember, I’ve been looking at animals like this for twenty years or so, but the wounds and crippling arthritis still shocks me (Bad).
But then I watch the SPANA team in action. (Good). With quiet efficiency, the two vets, three technicians, and three grooms, set about sorting out the queue (Good).
It’s nice to find somewhere unobtrusive, to keep out of sight, and just stand and watch ‘the action’.
Of course they’re not sentimental - SPANA staff see this and worse, six days a week. Yet alongside the quiet efficiency, as the different problems are assessed and ‘triaged’, or sorted into degrees of seriousness, there still remains that essential compassion. As one of the vets waits for a different wound dressing, I see him absent-mindedly fondling a donkey’s ears (Good).
Then I see an old grey mule. So old and thin, that frankly the only real solution is a trip to that great mule-stable in the sky (Bad – although quite Good as well, if you know what I mean). Then I see his owner. Thin as a pin, no teeth, and old enough to remember the Roman legions leaving Marrakech. Doesn’t look as if he’s eaten for a week (Bad) and when I ask, I hear that his mule is his only form of income – if the mule dies, he starves. So, we do what we can. Pain killers for the arthritis (the mule’s – the owner will just have to live with his), filing-down the teeth (the owner doesn’t have any), trimming the hooves (the owner’s are all twisted from ancient injuries), a wormer, then cleaning and dressing the sores and wounds (Good). We can give him a new bit, a doughnut bandage to lift the saddle of the sores (Good). We can give him a new head-collar and a SPANA nose-band, but by God, whatever we do, we can’t make him young again. In the end, I watch the two of them, like two brothers, limp off back into their hard cruel world (Bad) We have done all that we can.
Then we battle all day to agree the text for the eco-museum we are building in partnership with the Ministry of Eaux et Forets (definitely Bad), while the sun goes down, touching the snowy Atlas Mountains on the distant horizon red and gold, and we work on ‘til nearly ten. It’s not all beer and skittles.
