Pigeon Palace

Egyptians are serious about their pigeons. They live to eat squab, young pigeon stuffed with cracked wheat, and they like to fly or race them. The elaborate structure on top of the apartment building is a multistory pigeon coop. The pigeons are usually out free by day foraging and come home at night to be shut in for feeding and safety. 

Filming In The Countryside

A couple of young women are making a video on donkey care so they have been joining the vets of the Rural Wellness Initiative for filming. During a quiet moment the crew share stories

Open Sesame

I had shoulder surgery this summer and only had my left hand to use for a month or so. This is the first week I've had the approval from the doctor to ride out. 

This is a flowering field of sesame. I'll bet you had no idea this is what it looked like. 

Killing Farm Land

The news has stories of thousands of acres being sold to Arabs, but out here near Abu Sir, they are building warehouses by the hundred on good cultivation land. This would look to be a factory. How can our government be so stupid and shortsighted? 

Farming Friends

I love the contrast of the facial hair adornments on these two men. They are two of the farmers who brought their animals to the Rural Wellness Initiative clinic last week.

Moving The Calf

When you don't have a livestock truck, and most farmers here don't, you make do with what you have. In this case it's a pickup truck and A LOT if rope.  

Old Friends Care For Each Other

An older farmer's concern for his water buffalo's sore foot is clear in his face as he waits for the vet to come examine her at one of the Rural Wellness Initiative vet clinics. He was first in line for seeing us there. The buffalo had a crack in the sole of her foot and the treatment was quite simple really, frequent washing with betadine to keep it clean. Photo by Tulip Afifi.

Doing It The Hard Way

This is a sakia, an old fashioned metal water wheel that runs on donkey power. Usually they blindfold the donkey so that he doesn't know that he's walking in circles. Donkeys are much too smart to do THAT willingly.  This donkey, however, is sporting a nice fly mask rather than a blindfold, so the boy gets to walk in circles as well to keep the motor running. 

Cleanliness Is Next To Zucchini

These are loofah, used for scrubbing dishes, floors,and even people. They are sometimes pricey items in upscale pharmacies and makeup shops in Europe and North America. People sometimes think they come from the sea, thinking, I suspect, of sponges. But they come via brilliant yellow flowers from a vine much like that of zucchini.

Mystery Sticks

You see piles of them around town in any Egyptian city. It looks like bamboo and is closely related. Sugar cane has been grown in Egypt for thousands of years. Egypt was exporting cane sugar during Europe's dark ages. Now it is often crushed in the mother if all juicers to make sugar cane juice, a green juice that oddly enough isn't that sweet. The pulp retrieved from the crushing is dried and chopped to use as cattle feed. 

Light My Fire

I've barbecued a lot of ribs, hamburgers and chicken in my time, but I never stopped to think where the charcoal came from, other than from a nice bag at the grocery store. Out here in the farmland, however, there are small corners of land where the owners of trees that have to be trimmed can sell their wood to the charcoal burners. These people layer the wood carefully and then cover it all with wet straw. The wood and straw are then covered with a layer of dirt and old charcoal and the wood is set alight. It burns very slowly over a number of days and then the fire is put out. When everything is cool, the mounds are opened and the charcoal is taken out and put into bags, but usually old feed bags out here.  And that's how they do it.

Fading Into White.

We had a young German couple come to stay at the farm a little while ago. They do photographic art and went out to the Rural Wellness Initiative Egypt's mobile vet clinic with us. Jan Nikolai set up a white plastic drop cloth to shoot portraits of some of the farmers and children with their animals. The results were amazing.

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.

Movers And Shakers

Many of the farmers in rural Egypt rely on their donkeys to carry manure to the fields, to carry their crops home, to carry the farmers and their families on visits and errands. These patient and undervalued creatures are the prime movers of Egypt.

We Are The Eggmen

While a group of us were out riding the other afternoon a pickup truck carrying what must have been at least a thousand eggs passed us on the way from a chicken production warehouse to wherever it is that they take this many eggs. They will be left in their cartons standing in warehouses and stores for a number of weeks or until they are bought. Eggs, oddly enough, stay fresh unrefrigerated for months UNTIL you refrigerate them....and then they must be kept cold.

What Camels Really Do

Out on a ride the other day we saw a farmer leading his camel with a huge load of berseem clover. One camel can carry almost as much as a cart.

Apologies for being away. My annual case of bronchitis laid me a bit low.

Lending a Hand

Egypt's small farmers are being crushed by a lack of support. There are government subsidies on human medications to keep the prices affordable, but no subsidies are provided for veterinary medications that the farmers need for their livestock. These prices are rising steadily along with the prices of clothing, schools, books, and food that they need to buy with what little money they make from their crops, whose prices are rising much, much more slowly. Many farmers now are lucky to be able to pay for medications for their animals, but can't afford to pay any more to cover the cost of gas for the doctor's car or money for the doctor's time. Most vets can't afford to spend time without earning a salary so they are not going out to treat animals.

A few months ago the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends and Al Sorat Farm joined forces to provide free veterinary care to farmers between Shabramant and Abu Sir. Here the vets from ESAF and the grooms from Al Sorat are working on a donkey with an infection in his shoulder. They make weekly visits to different parts of of the farmland as it isn't easy for farmers to find time to take a sick or injured animal to either the clinic or the farm to have it checked. Much of the work consists of discussion with the owners about the proper care of their animals to help them keep them healthy.

Rope Of The Pharoahs

We were riding through the village of Sakkara and as we passed this garden, I noticed that the woman here was making a palm fiber rope. We've used this rope for construction around the farm because it is incredibly strong and doesn't degrade from the sunlight. It is spun from the brown fiber that they take off the palm trees when they are trimming the fronds from them. This is the same rope that was used to build the solar boat that is on display at Giza.

Walking In Circles

A blindfolded donkey walks alone around the track pulling the wooden bar that turns a sakia, a water wheel in a palm grove near Dahshur.

Semi-mechanised

Modern food consumers generally associate farmers with tractors. After all, fields must be plowed somehow. I don't know what proportion of Egyptian farms are big enough to justify owning a tractor, but around here, it isn't a lot. So usually one man in an area owns a tractor, often an ancient Russian machine like this that has probably been repaired with so many odd parts that it's more of a United Nations piece. He's hired by the hour or by the area of land to do the plowing. All the rest of the work is done by hand.