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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2008

Donkey Sanctuary & SPANA help in Sudan

ABU SHAWK, Sudan -- While most international aid groups working in North Darfur focus on helping displaced humans, the Donkey Sanctuary and Society for Protection of Animals Abroad are saving their asses--a top priority for the 27,000 displaced families now filling the Abu Shawk refugee camp, if they are ever to return to their pre-war way of life.

"Donkeys are the most valuable assets for the people in the region of Darfur," Donkey Sanctuary representative Mohamed Majzoub Fidiel told the Middle East Network for Animal Welfare conference in Cairo in December 2007.

Before the war, Fidiel said, "A rural household in the rural area that did not posses a donkey was described as extremely poor," in part because donkeys served in place of checking accounts and credit cards as movable assets of quick cash value. "Donkeys were used mainly as pack animals to carry crops from villages to markets, in collecting water and firewood, and for riding," Fidiel recounted, emphasizing the value of donkeys in fetching daily water supplies from wells often located several kilometers from rural dwellings.

Farmers in northern Darfur formerly used camel-drawn ploughs, Fidiel said. "Since armed bandits started looting camels," he continued, "many farmers have replaced them with donkeys."

Fidiel found in a June 2007 survey that about 40% of the Abu Shawk refugees arrived on donkeys, while 12% "used both donkeys and walking." Only about half of them--26% of the displaced families--still have a donkey.

"About 97% lost donkeys during their flight from their home villages," Fidiel learned. "Of these 74% were looted by Janjaweed," as the roving Arab militias of Darfur are called. "Three percent of the donkeys died on the road, and 12% were left behind by their people as they rushed out of the villages."

Sixty percent of the respondents told Fidiel that donkey theft had occurred in their villages; 73% "mentioned that donkeys are subject to theft in the camp."

But the most appalling loss of donkeys came in the first two years of the five-year-old Abu Shawk camp, when relief agencies failed to provide for the animals who arrived with the people. As many as 12,000 donkeys starved in the severely overgrazed surrounding desert. Only 2,200 donkeys survived the winter of 2003-2004, and just 1,300 remained by October 2004, when SPANA chief executive Jeremy Hulme and veterinary director Karen Jones began a feeding mission.

"United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization representative John Omukuba told me that each family needs at least two donkeys before they can go back to their farms and start rebuilding their lives," Hulme said at the time.

The lost donkeys are not easily replaced. The FAO has reported that the prices of cattle, sheep, and goats in Darfur have doubled since 2003, but the price of donkeys increased 50 to 100 times.