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.
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Morocco - the good and bad
The Road to Marrakesh
Patrick Sells, newly qualified from Liverpool Vet School, has finished his 3,100 mile sponsored motorbike ride to Marrakesh, which has brought in a staggering £9k!
Here are his impressions of the city and SPANA's work there:
"When I arrived in Marrakesh I was bowled over by the haphazardness of it all, I had forgotten how random Africa can be. An old man on a BMX, a sheep being carried on the back of a moped, a man in a wheelchair vying for a piece of road at a mad intersection, red lights ignored happily. I steered my forlorn course for the big green gates of the SPANA refuge. Inside I found a white-washed haven, a tranquil space in the mad busy city, where injured and sick working animals (as well as the small furries) are given free veterinary treatment, and a chance to rest."
"I threw myself into the work, finding it hugely rewarding. The ethos of the charity concentrates not only on treatment but also prevention. I spend time trimming feet and rasping teeth, between jaw-dropping cases, from trauma (usually road collisions) to disease (rabies to botulism), most of which you’d never encounter back home. Yesterday we removed a 3kg testicular tumour from a donkey, anaesthetised on a mattress on the ground outside. The frequent sight of severe, chronic harness wounds gives me incentive to do a good job on my project, which will hopefully shed light on possible intervention strategies for this huge problem."
"In the staff I have found firm friends, who have shown me the true Morocco, both in the city and up in the mountains, countless hilarious forays and adventures, happy memories. My third week coincided with the Muslim festival of Eid, so I spent the day preparing sheep with my new friends; in the ensuing feasts we ate everything from brain to testicles, my gastronomic horizons have been significantly broadened! Touch wood, I have only got sick once, and crashed my bike once, and I am still alive and kicking, loving every second here in Morocco, wishing I could stay longer. It has been a superb learning curve from a veterinary perspective, and a life experience I shall never forget. The contrast of Marrakesh and Midelt (high in the Atlas Mountains) is still staggering for me. I am off there again now, back up to the freezing heights for three weeks. I’m taking a tiny abandoned puppy along with me, I’ve named him Tadge (short for Tajine, photo). He will make a fine guard-dog for the Midelt refuge, behind which towers staggering snow-capped peaks. I will leave behind here friends and memories that I must revisit in the near future."
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.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
In the Bleak Midwinter!
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.
