Donkey business
August 7th, 2007 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
A friend of mine here in Yemen, a member of, shall we say, ‘the donor community’, told me about a private little project of two colleagues of his who are quite obviously in the completely wrong country for what they are trying to accomplish.
Being animal-lovers, they fight for the rights and humane treatment of animals, a normally worthy cause to spend ones time on, but a hopeless case in Yemen. For some mysterious reason, they have chosen to focus on Yemen’s donkeys. Being hard-working donkeys, they all wear out rather quickly and I guess Sana’a is full of donkeys in need of care and a retirement home.
The two, who I do not know personally I should add, decided to find a solution to this problem and to search for a way to help these poor donkey live out their retired lives in peace. They therefore set up a meeting with Sana’a Zoo.
Now, Sana’a Zoo already has a few problems of their own. They used to have a few lions in the zoo, but due to the lack of knowledge of contraception, the lions multiplied and multiplied. And multiplied some more. The zoo now boasts 48 lions packed together in five cages. This is the zoo’s main attraction, obviously, apart from a couple of hyenas (i presume they’re all the same sex since there aren’t more) and a lone German shepherd.
Our good samaritans thus went to the zoo to see what could be done for the poor donkeys. However, due to the appetite of the lions, the zoo people were more keen to feed the old donkeys to the predators than to set them up in their own apartment. It goes without saying that the meeting did not end in a good note…
Speaking of donkeys: Sana’a actually has its own donkey day, namely donkey Tuesday. On this day of the week, the city is full of donkeys. I don’t know what they all do on Tuesdays, but I presume there’s a lot of buying and selling of donkey’s on this particular day of the week.
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On a completely different note: Those of you who have travelled in the Middle East or are interested in the region might enjoy the website/blog of a woman I know here who is retracing the footsteps of Ibn Batuta and working as a tour guide at the same time. You’ll find her writing on http://www.girlsoloinarabia.com
Until next time.
Shaun Overton wrote on 08/7/07 at 23:51 :
The central donkey market is held just off of Souq al-baqr about 15 feet from Ibrahim’s restaurant and directly next to the juice stand. Walking there from CALES, if you turn left towards Souq an-nuhas, there is a small square on the right side. They usually pile the donkeys in that corner.
If you roll up around 8 am, you’ll see a few trucks. I’m a bit outdated, but as of a few years ago, the maximum number of donkey I ever saw on a Tuesday morning was 15.
Torstein Schiøtz Worren wrote on 08/9/07 at 13:23 :
Cool, I will take my camera there one morning inshallah.