Kelly's Girls

Yesterday we were doing a mobile veterinary clinic for the Rural Wellness Initiative just outside of Shabramant/Abu Sir, a farming area of Giza that is south of the Giza plateau. With all the governmental unrest and changes in the past few years, agricultural services to farmers have essentially died in Egypt, so members of my farm staff, some veterinarians and members of the Donkey Sanctuary staff have gotten together to provide free vet care for the small farmers in a roughly 300 acre square. Neighbours and friends donate money to buy simple preventative care veterinary medications such as wormers, vitamins,  and antibiotics for wound care.  The Donkey Sanctuary trained our staff in hoof trimming, abscess treatment and also how to flush the tear ducts of donkeys, which when blocked cause the tears to run down the donkeys' faces attracting flies which infect the skin with parasites causing long open sores on the face.

We have found a local craftsman to manufacture sturdy fly masks to protect the donkeys' faces from the flies, more  humane halters that help to control wayward donkeys without causing damage to their noses as is caused by the usual chain halters, and noseband covers to prevent chain damage for people who are using the chain halters.

But a huge part of the fun of this work is seeing the children of the countryside playing, like these two girls who were on their way home from school and hitched a ride on a VERY slow moving truck.  As it slowed even more to pass our clinic site, a little boy joined them on the bumper.

Everybody's Bruce Lee

The perfect playground for some twelve year old boys...a plain white plastic drop cloth for a stage and someone with a camera! One of Jan Nikolai's photos of the Abu Sir children.

Little Things Mean a Lot

Most farming families in rural Egypt don't own a car, a tractor, or anything more complicated than a bicycle or a motorcycle. The family donkey is a vital and not always well-understood part of the farmer's equipment. Flies can cause eye and skin infections and flies are endemic in farming areas. Most of the farmers make a sort of makeshift halter/bridle using chain across the nose area. Chain is cheap and unbreakable but hard on the skin so there are a number of lovely women who make these nose fuzzies to cover the chain and shield the donkey's nose. The Donkey Sanctuary distributes locally made flymasks (thus also providing jobs in an economy that really needs them) when they join The Rural Wellness Initiative Egypt's mobile vet clinics on Tuesday afternoons. The Rural Wellness Initiative is a group based on Facebook that provides free medical care to farmers in the area near our farm. Our staff works on these trips as donkey hoof trimmers, cow wormers and chicken holders, while I am the chief goat hoof trimmer. These clinics are making a difference in the health of the farmers' animals and thus with their productivity.

I want to apologise for not posting for a long time but my internet has been so terrible for the past month it's been really hard to get online.

Street Battles

Today was the first day of the Eid, the holiday after Ramadan, and we went for a ride in the villages near us. We went quite early, partly because of the heat and partly because of the children. The kids have been up since early and have breakfasted on kahk, bisquits and petit fours....which are essentially shortbread cookies filled with jam, dates, honey, or nuts. Long before noon, the sugar high is building and kids are out buying Eid toys from small shops. Like pretty much every year, the boys' favourite toy seems to have been various types of plastic pistols. Most of them will be broken before next weekend. Some Chinese factory has made a fortune today.

Important Addition To The Neighbourhood

We have much less pollution out here than in the city and more room, at least technically. But most of the land in the countryside is spoken for and used for farming or housing for the most part. The true stuff of life for male Egyptians under the age of about 50 is football (aka, soccer for North Americans) and it is played in any place that it can be played. In the villages along the desert there are football pitches lined up along the edge of the desert that are filled every Friday afternoon. Near my farm, an enterprising individual leveled some land, fenced it and laid out a football pitch that can be rented by the hour. If everyone playing chips in a couple of LE, the cost of a game is minimal for each. There are even lights for a night game. This is going to be a busy place.

Not Fisher Price

My housekeeper's son is figuring out walking but he wants to move faster than he can reasonably do so on his own. One of the villagers took some old nails and scrap wood and made this tricycle walker for him that he pushes around the garden. He still falls over but it's sort of slow motion.

Supervisors

My housekeeper's son was playing in the garden this afternoon and I noticed that four of the dogs had lined up next to each other and were watching him carefully. I couldn't resist the photo, but my moving over to take it did distract his oldest watcher at the left end.

A Place To Play

One of the things about the crowded Nile Valley is that there are so few places for leisure activities. Of course, leisure for the boys and men is football (soccer to North Americans) and for this you need a football field. These players are from the village of Abu Sir which is to the left of the photograph. Every Friday they gather on the edge of the desert and have a complete football league that plays in impromptu pitches.  In our little village, a clever land owner has built a football pitch complete with light poles on a piece of empty land. He will rent it out to people wanting to play by the hour, about LE 50 per hour which works out to be only about LE 2.5 per player for people wanting to play a game.

Smiles For The Camera

I never ride without a camera and in this case I was riding with a friend who also had one. Some of the village boys were climbing up into a huge mulberry tree to get the last of the spring fruit with the aid of a highly dubious stack of bricks. I got a shot of them, which was nice, and my friend Kelly got this one of me showing the boys their picture on my camera, which was much better.

Village Entrepreneurs

He isn't much older than his customers, and since it was Sham el Nessim weekend, I figure this was probably a temporary job to pick up some pocket money. The plastic bags are full of cotton candy and the seller announces his presence with the aid of a particularly raucous horn.

A Suitably Heroic Pose

There was a horrible duststorm blowing across the Nile from the west and traffic was pretty much at a standstill. The erection of huge concrete block walls on some of the main downtown streets has really put a nail into Cairo traffic's coffin. A group of young men were laughing and horsing around as we were stopped in traffic and one got up on the railing by the river for the appropriate male Egyptian portrait in a mobile phone.

Finishing The Job

Homework is universal. These boys are doing theirs in the garden of sculptor Adam Henein. I can't think of anywhere more comfortable.

The Cleaning Crew

My housekeeper has been bringing her now almost 6 month old son to work since he was two weeks old. I was worried at first about how the dogs would handle a baby since this is really the first one they've had much contact with. There have been visitors with babies but this little guy lives with us for about 6 hours a day. As you can see, I didn't have much to worry about. Our newest dog, 5 month old Dillah ("shady" in Arabic) has appointed herself the after meal baby car cleaner and is not averse to quickly wiping a spot on his cheek as well. The baby, in turn, babbles away at her and buries his head in her cheek. This is one village boy who won't be afraid of dogs.

A Sign of Normalcy

I suspect that Egyptian boys could find a place to play soccer ANYWHERE. This young man was getting in some good kicks to a barely inflated ball in a blocked street near Tahrir. A silver lining to any cloud.

The Best Bread

We needed to stop for some bread today. There is a bakery near a friend's place that makes really beautiful bread...whole wheat pita bread of course. I decided to take a picture of the bread on a rack, fresh from the oven and still puffed up. The baker's assistant also wanted his photo taken, so here he is. We almost died on the way home from the wonderful smell.

Wet Pleasure

On a sunny holiday afternoon we were riding along a trail in the countryside when we ran into a group of boys who were playing in the canal. I wouldn't voluntarily go swimming there, but then I'm not a roughly nine year old boy....a group not notoriously picky when it comes to fun. If I were their mother they'd all be taking a nice dose of parasite medicine pretty regularly too. But it was a perfect child moment.

Hey! Look What's In Here!

The boy was leading his sheep along a trail towards us. They were on their way home and the donkeys were leading the way as they usually do if the trip (like home to dinner) is important. He stopped to greet us as they were passing a gate to a fenced plot of land and the lead donkey took advantage of the distraction to check out the grass on the other side of the door.

Who Was That Masked Man?

I was escorting some visitors on a ride through the village of Sakkara yesterday and when we came around a corner we found this tiny little boy with only a tshirt on standing in the middle of the path. I called everyone's attention to our small obstacle and we very carefully passed by him. His mother was just up the way sitting on a step so he wasn't without supervision, but kids in the villages are assumed to be the responsibility of everyone so she wasn't too worried. We are always careful on the horses around any buildings.

Band On The Run

Another uniquely Egyptian traffic photo. While crawling along in some heavy traffic the other night we saw this band casually sitting on top of their equipment in a pickup truck. That's one way of keeping an eye on things being transported.

Cat's Cradle

We decided to drive through Nazlit el Semman because Catherine had never seen it. It's a pretty horrifying place with all the stables and the horses who are worked way too young and way too hard. The suffering, pain and fear are so thick you can cut them with a knife. At the very end, just before we turned onto a main road, we spotted these two young men, one of them teaching the other to play cat's cradle, an ancient string game.