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, 18 March 2008
A New Chapter in China
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, 13 February 2008
Mali and Paris - February 2008
Somebody once said ‘It’s a wonderful thing travel, it confirms all your prejudices'. Certainly, at five o’clock in the morning, on a freezing Sunday pre-dawn, I know exactly what they mean. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is far and away the worst airport in the world – and that’s up against some pretty stiff opposition – including gems like Heathrow, Algiers and not to mention Nouakchott, Mauritania.
I’m sitting writing this in Terminal ‘E’, after arriving over an hour and a half ago – there was only one bus to unload the whole plane, so we waited twenty minutes to get off, then were bussed for another twenty minutes around the airfield, waving at terminal ‘E’ as we whizzed past the first time, before being dropped at terminal ‘F’.
There a couple of nice secret policemen checked all our passports in case we were trying to invade France illegally. Then we tried to make our way back to ‘E’, being told (gleefully), that the navettes (connecting buses) were probably on strike this morning – having a little go at Sarko and his new bride. Eventually we were dumped at the end of a cold, damp, grey concrete tunnel, to fight our way up and through the next security screen into the mythical Terminal ‘E’.
It all seemed a long way away from north Mali, forty-eight hours earlier. We were doing a check (following a formal evaluation) of the Para-Vet project around Tombuctou and Gao that we started about ten years ago.
There had been a long and bloody civil war between the Tuareg, ‘Arab’ nomads in the north – and the black, West African Malian government based in Bamako.
The UN persuaded the Tuareg to accept a peace deal, and in return they were to get some health-care, a few schools and some veterinary input. SPANA was already established in Mali, so we were asked if we could help.
Over the years since then we’ve trained over fifty of the local tribesmen – they all had to be registered ex-terrorists - provided them with an initial ‘bank’ of basic veterinary
Medicines, established a price scale with the people, and set them going. We still do free prophylactic treatment for the donkeys and camels and follow-up training courses, but apart from that the whole thing is self-sustainable. Of course there have been a few disasters, and unsurprisingly some of the men are better and more dynamic than others, but in general it’s made a big difference to the people of the desert, and along the river, who are totally dependent on their livestock.
This time, we first went to see a Tuareg camp, away up in the sand dunes north of Tomuctou. We had a film producer with us wanting to make a series about Working Animals. After worming some of the camels (they suffer quite badly from mange), we were eating the obligatory goat together, when Mr. BBC asked the Tuareg headman, if the camels were important to him.
He looked at me in amazement. Was this stupid foreigner completely mad?
‘Of course we can’t live without them. Most days we just have camel milk and yoghurt to eat. Any grain has to be transported back on them from town. We ride them up deep into the Sahara to bring back salt. They are our transport when we move camp, carry water, gather firewood, or if one of the women is sick. Then when they are too old we eat them. Without them there can be no Tuareg’.
I wish I could say the same about Air France.
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.
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."
