Achieving Goals
The increasing number of supporters
who visit us in Sambel Kunda know that 'Horse and Donkey' works very closely with several
other initiatives which were set up by our co founder, Stella Brewer Marsden. Since
Stella's untimely death last year, we have worked even more closely with them to ensure
that Stella's vision continues.
The last two years have been seen great
strides with the charity thanks to your help. Sometimes when one is in the midst of it and
busy keeping the ball rolling it can be hard to truly appreciate just how much has been
achieved. The Gambia Horse and Donkey Trust were amongst the first organizations to join
the Make Poverty History coalition which, through its campaigning led to the Millennium
Development Goals which are international targets for the reduction of global poverty by
2015.
I recently came across them and compared our
achievements in Sambel Kunda with what had been set out and I hope that you will agree
that together we should all be justifiably proud of what has been achieved.
The Millennium Goals are:
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Our work in increasing the productivity of the animals and increasing the income of the
farmers is helping to achieve this.
Achieve universal primary education
Through the work of the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust's school sponsorship scheme and
Stella's networking, Sambel Kunda now has a newly rebuilt Primary School with solar power
(thanks to Strathclyde University) and access to the internet. The school roll has
increased from 90 to over 400 pupils. Horse and Donkey teaches animal welfare and
management in this school and 9 others.
Promote gender equality and empower
women We have the newly built skills centre for women in the village which was a
collaborative effort with Glasgow University students and Future in our Hands (a Swedish
charity.) The village ladies have learnt to make soap, tie dye, beautiful bags out of
recycled materials and lovely Fula bead necklaces. Horse and Donkey are selling these for
the ladies on their stands at Hickstead and they will soon be available via our website.
Reduce child mortality of under
fives by 2/3 The Alexander Edwards Village Clinic which was another of Stella's
initiatives, was built in Memory of Alex with funds raised by his parents. It not only
holds ante and post natal clinics but is also able to monitor maternal health.
Improve maternal health as
above
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other
diseases Recently Horse and Donkey supporter Ros Harris and her family raised
money to purchase 300 mosquito nets for the aged, the pregnant women and the children of
the villages surrounding us. The clinic provides community health care and first aid
provision to 8 villages.
Ensure environmental sustainability
What is more environmentally sustainable than a horse or a donkey?
Develop a global partnership for
development In the last year Horse and Donkey has played host to over 100
visitors. These have included nurses, teachers, engineers, veterinarians, trainers,
students and Rotarians all working together for the good of our communities. They have
come from all over the world: if that is not developing a global partnership for
development, what is?
Lollipop and Welcome
The work we do is full of highs and lows
and the last 6 months have been especially full. Each animal that comes in to us touches
us in some way. Some, like Lazarus, make such a huge impression that a Charity is born but
with each new patient, we learn more and some make a significant difference to what we do.
In August 2005 a tiny foal was born at Horse
and Donkey. Sadly her mother, who was very weak, died, so this little foal was hand reared
from birth. She was named Lollipop and with a great deal of love and effort, she grew into
a magnificent young filly of whom we were so proud. She and the other orphan fillies,
Welcome, Hope and Mo had a good life. They were well fed, had paddocks to play in and
could get out of the sun and into their fly screened stables when they needed to.
Gambian horses tend to be very narrow chested
and we had wondered how much of this was due to the breed or to poor nutrition. We had
noticed that the young horses that we had in seemed to broaden if they stayed with us long
enough, so we were anxious to see how 'the girls' would develop. They certainly didn't
disappoint us!
When they were 3 years old we thought we would
put them in foal and see how their offspring turned out in order to see how much
difference it would make to the foal when the mother had been well nourished all through
pregnancy. This is where things started to go badly wrong.
Lollipop, Mo and Welcome were put into foal by
3 different stallions. Initially all seemed well then Welcome appeared to come into season
again. A short time later so did Lollipop. Apart from this both the fillies seemed well
and Welcome made it her business to test the fencing on a daily basis and jump out if the
mood took her.
Gambian horses are usually ridden and worked
from 8 or 9 months old and as a result walk with a very stiff gait. Our girls were
different, they walked and jumped freely and unlike many others we see, they took great
joy out of being alive.
In December Welcome became ill. First she had
some facial paralysis, then she started to lose the co-ordination in her hind quarters.
The disease moved quickly and within 3 weeks, despite intensive nursing, Welcome was dead.
Lollipop seemed to miss her friend badly and
became very depressed. After a day or two she seemed to have colic. Some hours later she
aborted a beautiful foal. We were confused as she seemed to have been coming in season. A
few days later she also became in co-ordinated and though we treated her, the decline
continued until we had no choice but to put her to sleep.
Blood samples were sent to the UK and a
venereal disease called Dourine was confirmed. Unbeknown to us at the time, ALL 3
stallions were carriers and passed the disease on to our fillies.
We now have researchers collecting blood
samples to see how widespread this and other diseases are and once we have the results we
will be better able to plan a strategy to deal with the diseases.
Our yard is a quieter and much sadder place
without them. However, if through Lollipop and Welcome, we are able to help many other
horses, perhaps their short lives will not have been in vain.
Cherno Amadou Jallow - 10 years old
My name is Cherno Amadou Jallow, and I live in
a village called Missera in the Gambia. My family are farmers, and so it is very helpful
for us that we have a donkey. My donkey is called Moses, and he was given to us by The
Gambia Horse and Donkey Trust, to help with our farming because my family are very poor.
We do not have tractors where I live, so
horses and donkeys do most of the hard work on the farms. My family grow maize, pumpkins
and watermelons. We have a small metal machine, called a weeding machine which we attach
to Moses using ropes, and he pulls it through our fields to take away any weeds growing on
the farm. The machine is heavy, but Moses is good at pulling it, and someone stands behind
the machine to hold it and someone else stands at Moses' head to show him which way to go.
It is normally my job to steer Moses because I am the main person who looks after him.
Without Moses it would be very difficult to transport our crops to the local markets to
sell them, but since we have had him we are able to load all our crops onto a cart, and he
pulls them to the market for us. Sometimes the cart is very heavy, so we have to go very
slowly, and when we get to the riverside Moses likes to have a big drink.
During the rainy season we go to the farm
before breakfast, and will often work through the day but we try to let Moses have a rest
at lunch time because it is very difficult to work when it is so hot. After a rest we
start working again at about 5pm, and continue to work until it gets dark. In Gambia we do
most of our farming between July and October, which is the rainy season, because for the
rest of the year the ground is too dry to grow any crops.
In the dry season Moses life is a bit easier
without all the farming to do. We use him to collect firewood for cooking with, and also
to get fencing poles to fix our compound. We are not able to afford our own donkey cart,
but some other people in the village let us use theirs when they don't need it.
We have used Moses a few times to take sick
people to the nearest hospital, about 7km away, when they are sick with malaria because
malaria is a very serious disease and there is no other transport. We try to help them to
get there as quickly as possible even though Moses is not very fast!
I am lucky to live close to Gambia Horse and
Donkey, which means I also get to do some fun things with Moses in the Donkey Club which
they run some evenings. We trained in gymkhana races, and even raced in front of lots of
people at the annual show. My favourite race is the sack race, and Moses is good at
helping to pull me along faster when I am in the sack!
I was very proud last year because Moses won a
1st and a 2nd prize in the show for being well looked after and for looking very healthy.
We won a big rosette which I have in my house now.
Moses has his own house in our compound, which
is almost the same as my own house. It is made from mud blocks, and has mosquito nets over
the windows to stop him from getting bitten too much in the rainy season.
If anything bad ever happens to Moses I will
be very unhappy because without him my family would find life very hard, and would have to
do much more hard work by hand which is very difficult. Every day I take him to the water
pump in the middle of the village to have a drink, and I feed him groundnut hay and
sometimes pumpkins. His favourite food is rice bran, but this is a special treat for him
as we can't afford to feed it to him every day. I have had Moses for 3 years now, and I am
so happy that he was given to us. I love my donkey Moses.
Sambel Kunda
What is day to day life really like when you are working for Horse and Donkey in rural
Gambia?
Working as a Volunteer by Anna Saillet
Can you think on your feet, stand on your
head and rub your belly all at the same time? I think that's what it should have said on
the advert to volunteer for Gambia Horse and Donkey for a year! Living in a tiny remote
village without electricity and hot water is the easy part and eating a meal which doesn't
contain rice is a huge treat, with indescribable pleasures! Routine is out of the window.
Whilst we have a basic outline of a routine,
going to local 'lumo's' (markets) every Saturday, Sunday, Monday and every other Tuesday,
the days, weeks and months all merge into one. Time takes on a whole new dimension,
somehow going fast and slow all at once!
This is not the place for the faint hearted or
the indecisive. Every day is filled with decisions to be made, whether it be a call of
life or death for a sick animal, a decision on which staff members should go trekking each
day or simply what we can have for dinner with such a limited selection of ingredients!
With 14 trained Gambian staff working at GHDT
the yard is always bustling and each day has its own challenges. There are several regular
programmes which we undertake, one being the school education programme. This involves
travelling around to 10 local schools to teach about caring for horses and donkeys
correctly. Conscious of not wanting our classes to be 'just another boring lesson' we
often find ourselves dressed as donkeys crawling around a classroom floor, doing puppet
shows with soft toy horses and donkeys, and regularly clearing up donkey droppings from a
classroom floor when our real life demonstration animals decide to deposit a present.
Our last lesson before Easter confirmed that
our rather 'different' lessons had indeed been a great success. On doing a quiz I was more
than a little overwhelmed to see almost every hand in the class go up to answer each
question, stretching higher and higher in the hope that they would be given the
opportunity to answer the question. Even when the correct answer was given hands still
stayed stretching upwards for the chance to expand on the answer to prove that they
remembered more than their friend.
The weekly treks to lumo's are hot, busy,
difficult and rewarding. Treating sick animals on the basis of physical signs only is
difficult at the best of times, let alone in the blistering heat! Thankfully some of our
staff are trained in using a microscope, so are able to look at the blood to confirm
whether or not an animal has Trypanosomiasis, which is a very common and dangerous disease
here.
It is not uncommon to be presented with horses
and donkeys with severely fractured legs asking us to fix them. The things that have been
achieved here make me seriously question just how many horses are unnecessarily put to
sleep in the UK, as we have living proof in our horses and donkeys at GHDT that they can
recover from broken bones, horrendous wounds, horrific burns and even diseases which cause
temporary paralysis.
For religious reasons many owners are against
euthanasia, and this means that often an owner will not allow us to humanely kill a
terminally sick animal, and instead we have to do everything we can to save the animal and
limit its suffering. This at times can be heart wrenching, but when I see our stallion,
Tallah, galloping around the paddock totally oblivious to the fact that he ever had a
broken leg it gives me the strength to just keep on trying our best, with the little that
we have.
The house at GHDT is a busy one. It's
certainly not the place to be if you're the sort of person who likes to finish work and
relax at 6pm! If there's not a member of staff around asking for one favour or another,
then it may be someone from the village begging for a lift to the nearest hospital perhaps
for a lady going through a difficult birth or with a sick or injured child. If you're
lucky this call will come around 8 or 9pm; if you're not so lucky it is more likely to be
around 3 or 4am! Of course, with a yard of often very sick horses and donkeys it's
inevitable that from time to time there's the odd one that needs someone to stay up with
it all night, to nurse it through to the daylight hours; that's without taking into
consideration the night time feeds for any orphaned horses, donkeys, sheep or goats that
happen to fall into our lives! Then you have the odd night in which there are no dramas.
No knocks on the door, just a nice cold shower and an early night.
It takes a while of living at GHDT before you
are able to get a good nights sleep however. The nights you most need a good sleep are
undoubtedly those in which the animals create a cacophony of noise; donkeys braying, dogs
howling long into the night, hyenas laughing, cows mooing, bush babies screaming and
crickets chattering away to each other in their morse code language! Once you're
habituated to it, it becomes quite normal and I rarely find myself being awoken.
We are very fortunate to have vets from the UK
to come out regularly to teach some students from Gambia College about equine medicine.
Our staff (including myself) are extremely lucky to have been taught how to do injections,
stomach tubing, and stitching amongst other important procedures.
The house comes alive with people during these
periods, and also at the time of the Annual Show. Last year we wondered where we were
going to squeeze 16 visitors from the UK, but amazingly we managed it and had two of the
most hilarious weeks of my time here.
Amongst all of this I have helped to put out a
bush fire, managed to rescue a vehicle from being totally sunk in the mud of the rainy
season, attended some wonderful local entertainment programmes, carried tree trunks on my
head, taught some English lessons, organized the day to day running of the busy yard, and
so the list goes on.
Life here can be quite tough and you have to
be flexible yet rigid. For some of the very gory scenes I have witnessed or been part of I
am thankful to be blessed with a strong stomach. Above all, this place gives you a great
sense of adventure and achievement. On a good day it feels as though I've climbed a
thousand mountains and taken in the beauty of the view at the top of each and every one.
On a bad day it feels like you're sinking to the bottom of the river, but these are few
and far between, and anyway... wouldn't life be boring without a challenge!!
"With her usual modesty, Anna
'forgot' to mention how she saved the lives of a boat full of people when the boat
capsized on the river in a freak storm. After ensuring that everyone was safely holding
onto the capsized boat, she swam through strong currents and ran barefoot for several
miles through dense bush to seek help. No lives were lost and Anna is deservedly something
of a local heroine - THANK YOU ANNA!"
Visiting university staff, vets and lots of
other experts come out to Sambel Kunda to train the staff, volunteers and the college
students. They inspire everyone to be professional and positive in their approach to the
animals and their owners. The opportunities that this training brings to our team of
staff, working in isolation out in the bush, is amazing and truly life changing for them,
their families and the equine population. Not all our staff are literate and some have
very limited English but they never fail to amaze everyone with what they do achieve.
Fund Raising
How many supporters does Horse and
Donkey have? Ann Varley
Everyone reading this newsletter is committed
to the work that our Charity does and admired the achievements that are there to be seen.
Times are difficult for us all but if everyone who reads this newsletter could do one
fundraising activity over the summer months, it will mean that Heather can look forward
rather than having to continually worry about keeping all the different projects going.
All are vital to the horses and donkeys in The Gambia and to the community. As you will
have read, Horse and Donkey is really needed and the work we do is respected and valued by
the community. We are all having a tough time but for life in Gambia with survival relying
on a the wellbeing of a donkey or your horse, it takes so little to tip the balance. All
our projects are now well established but we still need to be able to maintain the work we
do and move out of the Sambel region. We have a team of students ready to qualify and they
are the key to the broadening of our work. If we ALL pull together in a small way, it
really will make a big impact and by using imagination you can make some money and have a
lot of fun.
Every little bit helps and we need you
now, more than ever before! |