Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

This makes all the sense in the world and if you saw the way these people live, you would understand. In fact, in many cases their animals get better care than the family do.....but honestly, that isn't saying much.  Most farmers live in bare houses of brick or mudbrick with (if they are lucky) bare concrete floors.  These "houses" consist of maybe 3 rooms for a family of ???  They do their cooking on something that you would recognise as a camp stove.  There is no kitchen.  The stove must be run with gas (comes in battered steel cylinders) which must be purchased with money.  So a lot of the cooking is done outdoors on a homemade oven that is heated with dry waterbuffalo manure patties....guess who gets to make these.  What money they get from their crops usually has to go to school supplies for kids, cloth for clothing (homemade of course), shoes, seed and so on.  The family and the animals get to eat whatever is grown on the farm.. Most farmers keep a waterbuffalo and/or goats and sheep or a cow for milk and cheese, which they make themselves.  Most of them do not have refrigerators. Electricity costs money.  Refrigerators are expensive and the electricity in the countryside is erratic to say the least.  

The farm houses have cotton mattresses and may have benches built in along the walls made from brick or mud brick.  No fans, no air conditioning no running water (they have access to clean well water from a hand pump...rich people like me have electric pumps.) Needless to say, no washing machines as well.  The horses and the farmers as well would do with a little shade sometimes but when you have to haul produce to market on a wood wagon, there is no shade for anyone, no cushion to sit on, nothing.  The wagons always carry food for the horses and water is available almost everywhere for animals.  Food and water for people is not so easy.

I have almost come to blows with people who mistreat their animals, but the majority of the farmers are working in the complete dark of illiteracy and ignorance and are doing their best.  It just isn't very good...not for the animals, not for themselves, not for their children.  Despite the fact that they essentially live in a different century from me, most of them are basically very decent, polite people.

Maryanne
Cairo, Egypt
On Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003, at 12:05 Africa/Cairo, Gabi (Ra'anana Farm) wrote:

> That has always been a question to me...
> ?
> If their livelihood so much depend on their working horse, he would surely work harder and live longer if he could just get a little shade sometimes and a little more to drink more often, and a little old rag to pad under the ill-fitting harness...
> ?