…longing.

“…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus

There are times when I feel such a longing for the West of Ireland that it is like a hunger. I was brought up in Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny and only visited the West a number of times over the past few years. But I feel a connection to the Aran islands which feels nearly physical.  I love its energy. Maybe because it is steeped in spiritual history and still feels so Irish! Maybe it is because it is the energy gateway to the rest of Europe through the Atlantic sea. Maybe too it is because the islands are surrounded by the sea and solitude is still possible here.

Old shed on Inis Meain.

The elemental nature of the place brings a sense of connectedness. I always feel like I am part of the landscape here. I can feel the hundreds of years of toil and tragedy as I wander the small roads that wind through stone walled fields, reclaimed from the barren landscape. A hard life to be sure but ultimately healing in these times.

The Aran landscape.

I have a desire recently to devour everything I can read about how people lived there, how they survived, how they spoke, what they believed. I’m really not sure why I feel like this as I live in Luxor and it couldn’t be more different. But is it? Perhaps the layers of energy are similar? The struggle to survive in a barren landscape may not be all that different. The sense of ancient history, carved from the stones and it’s connection to the power of the water. Both cultures have had to master their surroundings , to bring fertility from stone and water.

St. Benan’s Chapel, Inis Mor.

But there is one huge difference between the two places, apart from the obvious, and that is the atmosphere. In Luxor the air feels ‘full’. Full of people’s energy and thought-forms. Their emotions and religion, heard all day, every day. As a healer of emotions it is a challenging place to live. There are so many dysfunctional layers of human consciousness here. But even though the Aran Islands have an equally long history their air is free of all that. Nature is still abundant here. The energy of the sea, the rocks and nature’s struggle for survival give it a special feeling.

Life Between the Rocks.

Maybe that is why the earliest Christians chose these Islands to settle or maybe its because of its refined energy. The Aran Islands are the main gateway into Ireland of a large meridian which runs right across Ireland to the East coast, and moving through Glendalough and out into the Irish Sea. If healers feel that now then the early spiritual people who settled the Islands must have felt it too. These places always seem to end up as spiritually natural places, where the Goddess of the Land is venerated and the fertility of the Sun/Son is recognised.

View from Dun Fearbhaigh.

Perhaps it is as Seth, channelled through Jane Roberts in the 70′s and 80′s, suggests. That there is one of four main energy points in the Middle East which is why the three main religions of this part of the world were born there. They are places of great change which is why they are always in a state of conflict and growth. Perhaps because Aran is so far away from all that turmoil that it becomes a place of peace. But by the same token, the Aran Islands are the entrance of the main meridian which travels through Europe from the Atlantic Sea.  This means that the sacred places established by holy people on the Aran Islands become the seed thoughts and ideas of those who established these communities and which then influence human thinking in the countries the meridian runs through.

St. Brigit’s Chapel.

With the establishment of these new Christian ideas, ideas untainted by Rome and still very nature-based, we see  how Ireland later became the guardian of Sacred literature and  the Land of learning .  Holy Isles indeed.

Buried beneath the Sands.

What I also loved about the Early Christian settlements here are the fact that there were also settlements founded by female saints.  There are tiny chapels dedicated to these saints who were equal to the men who founded theirs. And their nature-based beliefs fit so beautifully into the nature-based beliefs of the people who already inhabited the islands. There was no conflict between the old and the new. Everything was accepted because everything was spoken of in the same language, both symbolic and actual, and with the same veneration. It is sad, that in later years, the women of Christianity became of lesser value in the eyes of the Roman Church!

Can you believe that this is Ireland? Ah the solitude…

Or maybe, my longing is as prosaic as the need for time. Time to write without interruption and without my lovely Egyptian husband’s constant need for attention! God love him. The Aran Islands are the place for solitude, reflection and connection. Many writers have found a haven there. The week I spent there in 2008 I wrote continuously. It was heavenly! If only I could find that heaven here!

Hope amidst the Corruption.

We are into the second day now of Egyptian voting and there is a mixture of hope and familiarity! Omar went to cast his vote yesterday and was aware of all the Muslim Brotherhood people trying to influence people’s votes.  They are out paying people 10LE to vote for their local candidate. However, Egyptians are not stupid. They happily took the money and then voted for who they were going to vote for anyway!!!

Handing out leaflets, illegally, at one of the Luxor polling stations where women are voting.

Everyone feels good about the elections and were originally hopeful of a positive outcome, but they become as sceptical as ever when confronted by the corruption and vote-rigging which they see still happening. Nothing has really changed.  But they still go.

The army has been really clever too in organising the timing for this round of voting. They chose the beginning of the hot season, where only those who are dedicated will venture out to queue in the 45 degree heat while they look up your ‘number’.  They have sent people from Luxor to vote in Esna, which is an hours drive away, or El Maris which is a half-hour drive away. So if you don’t have transport…you can’t vote. No-one quite understands why but it seems pretty obvious to me.

Women’s early morning Queue in Lower Egypt. Before it got too hot!

When people get to the polling stations, not sure where they are supposed to be voting, they are told that they have to go to Esna, or El Maris to vote because their ID number is not here. They have pages of people’s voting numbers but no proper system to go with them. Omar went to cast his vote and luckily checked on-line to see where his vote was to be cast and to record his number. When he reached the table the man had a huge pile of papers which he rifled through to find his number telling him that he was supposed to be at Esna to sign. He was just too lazy to check through all the names. Omar then gave him his number and the man checked and lo and behold there it was!!! It wasn’t at Esna after all! So he voted. But how many people are being sent on a wild goose chase?

…went a bit overboard on the ink!

Anyway, he cast his vote and had his finger dipped in ink so that he couldn’t vote again but he says the process is so flimsy that it is easy to rig it.  The Muslim Brotherhood who stay close-by under the guise of protecting the process, also close the stations for prayers. Who knows what they are doing in the meantime??? They have no authority to do it but are doing it anyway!

One 70 year old woman, whom Omar helped to get her number online, got to the polling station where there was a long line of queueing women. Because she had her number she went right in and presented herself to the man behind the desk and handed him her number and ID card. He was impressed that this 70 year old woman could be so organised…and computer literate. He showed her the polling booth and she tried to act as if this was something she did every day. He gave her the voting ballot and the pen but she didn’t actually know where the man she wanted to vote for was on the paper. But instead of looking a fool and being embarrassed she signed her name on one of the names and left. She has no idea who she voted for! She knew who she wanted to vote for…

When I heard this story I wondered how many other illiterate women and men were too embarrassed to ask where their preferred candidate was so that they could sign! Its quite sad really.

There are foreign people in Luxor reporting on how the voting is going but they are not seeing the true picture. They are seeing the queues and the happy faces. This is,  after all, their first free democratic election. But they are not seeing what is going on around it. The Muslim Brotherhood have been out en-force to make sure their candidate gets elected. They will use whatever they can, including bribery and coercion. One of the failed parliamentary candidates from Qurna had his wife rent two shop spaces beside one of the polling stations to offer refreshments to the voters!!! He is a Brotherhood member too!

You can’t trust anyone. But I imagine that if the army don’t get the man they want, which I’m pretty sure they will, by whatever means, they will scupper the process and we will be seeing more elections in June. Just wait for the next revolution! it is going to take some time for Egypt to be cleansed of all its corruption. But it has to start somewhere…

Rats and Cats.

Well the ongoing story of the rats is…ongoing! My brother-in-law Amer set some cage traps for them and it caught one. The rats, having lost their source of hens eggs when we moved the hens, began to eat the pigeon eggs next door! My mother-in-law was not impressed, to say the least!

The Villain.

Omar  brought the rat upstairs to show me. It was much smaller than I expected. I remember the rats from my childhood in Graiguenamanagh, Ireland.

The View of Graig from the Tinnahinch Woods.

We lived in the Step House, (so-named because we had six steps leading up to the door) beside the turf market, which in my childhood in the 60′s still had its water-pump for those who still didn’t have running water! Our house was right beside the Duiske River which runs into the barrow. Our kitchen was built out over the river so we could see all the wild herons and cranes who came here to eat. The Duiske ran along the back of the main street and there were three butchers on that side. The way that they dealt with offal in those days was to throw it in the river, so would see large lumps of fat and swollen offal getting stuck on the rocks and over-hanging trees as it floated downstream.

The Duiske River.

The cranes weren’t the only things that liked the offal however. There were huge river rats, well-fed as you can imagine, who also loved the discarded fat!! Our backyard wall was the wall of the river and we had a little wooden door which opened up to a platform beside the river.  As kids we  played there a lot as the river was not very deep. But, on occasion, the river rats would come into our garden and to my mind they were huge! My mother would scream at us to come upstairs and would then call my father, from our factory where he worked as manager, and tell him to come home!!! While waiting for him to come we would watch the large rats in the backyard from the safety of our kitchen window. I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about!!! It was only a rat! My father would then arrive and get his shotgun and bang went the rats! I felt it was rather sad for the rats as they weren’t doing any harm!!

Poor Rat!

Our little rat, terrified in his cage, evoked the same feelings. I didn’t like the way he was eating our eggs, although I was not sure that he was the culprit while the chucks were in the big hen house, because there was never any left-over shell, so I doubted whether it was the rats taking them!! Pigeon eggs are very much smaller and they didn’t take them away but ate the contents and left the empty shell behind!! The poor rat, although a nuisance, still had the right to feed itself.  But this rat was going to be drowned…in the cage. Oh God…another emotional/ethical dilemma.

Omar took the cage out onto the balcony, filled a bucket with water, and immersed the cage, with the rat in it, into the water. Oh my good God! Even the thought of the poor rat…

He called me from the balcony to come and see. REALLY??? ‘No thanks’ I yelled back from the kitchen. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss this time’ ,I muttered to myself!!! I couldn’t believe he actually wanted me to witness it!!! Although I could understand the interest! I used to feel the same way while dissecting fish-eyes when my father was gutting salmon!!!

So the rat was ‘dispatched’.  And everything was fine for a couple of days! THEN we were told by Omar’s brother that he had seen a big cat jump into the chicken house and take away an egg!!! Three times!!!!  So we have had to dismantle the chicken house and put wire above it to stop him from getting in. The amount of stray cats  here is a nightmare!!!

Looks cute doesn’t he???

Where is the pied piper when you need him!!!

The Unexpected Newbies.

This morning we went downstairs to feed the chucks as usual!We gave them their water, checked the eggs and counted them to see exactly how many laying hens we have! We get around 6 eggs a day from 16 hens!!! That’s Egyptian breeds for you! We only own three of those hens! And I’m pretty sure that one of them is only starting to lay, as  in the last week we have found soft-shelled eggs.

Soft-shelled Egg.

Initially we thought that she needed more calcium so we added it to their feed but the second time we found it it was in their basin of water!!! My mother-in-law had told us that when a hen lays a lot of eggs and uses up her resources that she will lay soft-shelled eggs. But I pretty much doubted that she would lay them in the water! Then I remembered that when young hens are getting ready to lay that they lay ‘odd’ eggs. So I looked it up! Yep. It happens! It is one of our hens.

Water Fowl. Keeping Cool.

This morning while we were feeding them I saw one hen, the one with the bare sides and head, get into the basin of water and just sit there. Aha!!! Now I know which one it is! Easy to identify when we come to separate them next week.

Yesterday morning, after we had fed the chucks, we heard a van announcing something over a loud-speaker. It was the chicken man! He sells poultry door to door. We ended up buying twelve four-week old hens, well, one of them is a cockerel but never-mind!

New additions…

I wanted some Naked-necked chickens and a silver pencil Fayoumi as I love the colours. The Naked-necked ones are the best layers of the Egyptian varieties and better suited to the weather so I definitely wanted them. Although, finding pure-breed anything here is an impossibility as they are not really interested in breeds so much as egg and meat production in the home.( But I’m not sure that that the one in the picture is female!!! It has a bigger comb than all the others. If it turns out to be male we will have to think again about how to house them as we have a cockerel already.)

Lovely little white patches…

The man in the van grabbed all twelve chicks by one leg and handed them to me in a bunch, squawking! I tried to make sense of this bundle of legs, wings and heads and supported them underneath so I could bring them upstairs to our flat!

Beautiful colours.

 The family expected me to put them in with the other laying hens but I wanted to quarantine them first and then introduce them slowly, or even give them their own run!! Our other four new hens were still getting used to being with the others and, because we are building a new place for them, I didn’t want to add to their stress!!! The newbies would just have to stay upstairs in the spare room in the flat!! With the overhead fan and ceramic floors!!! The family all think I am crazy! My mother-in-law joked that  the hens were living on ceramic tiles while she had a dirt floor!

The naked-neck.

But I want to do this the way I would have done in Ireland and the UK. The chickens welfare comes first!  Because animals are not really seen as having any value other than their function they are used to the full but not taken care of properly.  People here do not realise that animals feel pain, or might not be happy or might be hungry, or might not like actually being chained to a three foot long chain for all of your life just so you can guard the house!

Bob having a nice shake after his dip!

Chickens are just food and therefore deserve no real care. When we were given a broiler this morning as a gift it was handed to me by the wings. I held it the way I would normally hold a chicken, supporting its whole body, and when we sent it upstairs with one of the girls she immediately went to grab it by one leg. I told her to carry it properly and she was worried about it pooing on her!!! She would be eating it in two hours so what was the problem!? Even a broiler needs to be treated well before it is killed.

Anyway, I put it in with the new chicks and gave it a little peace, and water, before it had its throat cut, Halal-style. Its life might be forced but at least its death gave it some respite!

Not Quite a Midnight Ramble…

We got up at 3.30 am to go to the, now harvested, sugar-cane field owned by my husband Omar’s family!  The men of the family were all up at 4.Am every morning to go and cut and sort the cane which was then taken by Tractor and trailer to the factory! It reminded me of my childhood! We used to own a corn-processing factory in Graiguenemanagh,  Ireland, and as children, we knew all the farmers by name. I loved sitting on top of the freshly harvested corn as we drove to the factory! It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays of course as it is a health and safety risk but we enjoyed it. We just had to make sure none of the hundreds of earwigs got anywhere near our ears!!!

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The brothers and Omar got up early as it is hot here now and early morning work is a necessity. Women who had no husbands, and who needed food for their animals, came and helped; stripping the sugar-cane of all its green leaves after the men had chopped it down.  Then they could bring it home on a donkey and cart. Often one of the brothers would bring the donkey cart piled high with sugar-cane leaves to the women’s homes if they had no way of taking it themselves. For many people here it is the main animal fodder and the only way they can afford to feed their animals. But this is only six months out of every twelve!  For people who have struggled with poverty all their lives they will take either of two routes. They will either become extremely greedy and selfish and try to make money in any way they can or they will share everything they have, no matter how little, because they understand the struggle to make ends meet.

One man and his son, came to ‘help’ by taking the green leaves back for their own animals. But this man made derogatory statements about one of the brother’s wives!  He was put in his place by allowing the poorer women to have the best leaves. But it turns out that this man has lots of his own land but didn’t want to share its leftover leaves and he poached the workers to come and work for him! He also owns a shop which does very well. But he was quite happy to take advantage of Omar’s family who give everything they have when they can. Money can be a powerful teacher!

We walked down to the field and watched as the sun came up. It was beautiful and peaceful. We had spent every penny on getting the harvest in fast so now we were down to basics, £10 for two weeks, but, as usual, when you give you also receive. We found, on our way back, lots of berseem seeds which had fallen from a torn bag so we collected it all and brought it home. It was good quality seed! There was enough to grow and feed the sheep and chickens for months! We also found some ears of wheat, that came home too, so I could grow it and learn how to grind it the really old-fashioned way, with stones! They can still be gotten here!

It was well worth getting up early but next time we will take the donkey and cart…its not often the locals see a foreign woman on a donkey! It will give them something to talk about…

Carter Castle Luxor. Final Part.

On we go…

Dining room.

The next room in Carter’s house is the Dining Room. A lovely, airy room with patio doors leading out onto a small verandah. This room leads both into the kitchen and the foyer. It was surprisingly cool and I wondered how they managed to keep it so during the very hot summers. It was hot here today and yet it felt comfortable.  Although I noticed that they has some very old electric fans in the corner of each room, with blades made of brass so they obviously had some help!

His artist’s easel sits in one corner of the room and a shelf of books is in another. Under glass on the table are photos and copies of his writing and his drawings of the objects found within the tomb. I was interested in his writing as it was very feminine and quite small. Not a man who liked to be very visible and yet he chose a work which made him famous!

The Next room was a spare room for when his family came to visit. It was a large room which looked out onto the tiny garden at the back of the house.

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Each window had lovely lace curtains, which were obviously original as they looked like the would fall apart if you so much as breathed on them!!! They hadn’t been washed for a very long time, but somehow this added to their beauty. I wonder if it possible to get these now as I would love  them!

Spare room for when his family came to visit.

You might have noticed…or not…that I never mentioned a bathroom. The bathroom in the house is a modern bathroom, which was disappointing. I was hoping for a 1920′s bathroom or at least an outhouse!!!! But there you go!!! But they did have one of those old towel racks so I guess that should keep me happy!! Anyway, it would have been lovely no matter what they ate! Interestingly, before the revolution, Zahi Hawass decided that one could sleep in this house on specified nights for $10.000 a night!!!!!  I wonder if that included breakfast…and who got the money?

Carter Castle in Luxor Part 2.

Back to the Carter house in Luxor. 

Water jars.

The next room, which was a lovely surprise, was his darkroom and the room where the water jars were stored to keep the water clean and cool. I’m not sure that it was all this clean and white however when he lived there as his house was surrounded by desert at this time and things never stay that clean for long!!! And he would not have had those beautiful Nubian pottery lamps which shine their beautiful patterns on the prisitine walls. But I love the look! In the reconstruction they have done a great job.

They have a rather huge camera outside his darkroom, which once belonged to Harry Burton, the official Tutankhamun photographer. It must have made photography quite a challenge in those days. He would have had to carry it to the site, set it up and then carry it back to the house again when he was finished. It would have been a major production!!!!

Harry Burton’s camera.

But it is a beautiful piece of workmanship. Made mainly of wood it looks more like a printing press than a camera!!! But it did have wheels, or rather casters, so there was some mobility.  Although not necessarily on the desert floor!! Looking at the photos of the excavation it is also clear that they were not spontaneous photos but well-planned operations!!! Everything is perfectly executed!!!

Carter’s darkroom

His darkroom was painted a dark red and pink. Was this its original colour? It was separated into two rooms and was certainly dark enough for me to use my flash on the camera! It was such a lovely idea to imagine him working in the dark with all his chemicals, slowly developing his photos of the tomb and its artefacts. I could imagine his focus and excitement, and his frustration when everything had to stop for wars, internal ministry issues and money problems. But he was a man with incredible perseverance. He knew it was there somewhere and he didn’t give up looking.

I can identify with his thinking in many ways. All of my adult life I have tried, unsuccessfully, to create a life where I could live like he did. Exploring, digging, recording and writing. As an adult I went to Winchester University to study practical archaeology because, A) I have always loved it and B) my phantasy (as opposed to fantasy!) was to live a life where I could totally focus on my research and discoveries without having to talk or interact with too many people!!! I could be totally immersed in what I was doing, like a laboratory technician and his/her microscope. I yearned for that life. However, the life of a healer is never a solitary one!! But I still yearn for the freedom to be immersed in some creative, exploratory venture which very little disturbance!!!

Carter’s Kitchen

The next room was the kitchen. Oh…it felt so spacious and light. It had a Frigidaire!!! A gas cooker and another cooker. And running water. He created the comforts of home. Power came from a generator outside the house and the running water was housed in a water tank on the roof, which may have been gravity fed! I had never seen a gas cooker this old and was sceptical that they even existed. I was also sceptical about the electric oven and the fridge? But, reality notwithstanding, I decided that I want a kitchen just like it someday! As it turned out however, there was every possibility that the Frigidaire was genuine as they were first put on sale in 1913 and Carter lived in this house until after 1922, which is the year they discovered Tutankhamuns’ tomb. Gas ovens too were in existence since the late 19th century so maybe…

Some of the items were copies of original items but they don’t tell you which is real and which is not. But I guess it doesn’t matter as they are all ‘age-authenic’.

The furniture in the kitchen had all been stencilled too which I wondered about! But perhaps it was done to make it look old?

Carter’s Kitchen Cupboards.

I did love the old cupboard though! It was one of those with the wire mesh to keep the flies off the food! It reminded me of the outdoor cupboards from the which we used to have in the ‘old’ days and which were used to keep the food cool  in. We used to put food that needed to be cool, like cheese,meat etc, in it. It not only kept it cool but kept the flies off too. For people who lived on farms this latter protection was invaluable!!!

Cooker!

All told, I loved this kitchen.  I loved the white, airiness of it and the space!!! It was clean and clear. He must have loved living here although I doubt that he spent much time in here!!!  He would have had other people to cook for him.I also loved the cooker hood. This is a definite Western influence as Egyptian homes do not have these and this one looks more like a chimney breast than a hood but there was a hole in the wall behind this which allowed the warm air from cooking to filter outside. If you have tried cooking in an Egyptian kitchen you will know how important it is to have a air extraction system as it gets pretty hot in there!!! This cooker hood allowed the hot air ‘out’ instead of adding to the already stifling hot kitchen.

But the dining-room? That he would have spent time in! But I will write about that tomorrow!

Glass Gem Corn, and other heirloom jewels of the corn cabinet…

Glass Gem Corn, and other heirloom jewels of the corn cabinet….

Carter’s Castle. Luxor 2011. Part 1.

Today we visited the House that Howard Carter lived in when he was looking for the tomb of Tutankhamun. It was beautiful!!!  It has given me lots of ideas of how I would like our flat here in Egypt to look like. The feeling in the house was beautiful and I could easily have lived there. I decided that I would build one like it in the future to live in.

Foyer of Carter’s House.

It was lovely because there were no tourists here so we had the place to ourselves, apart from the guide who works there. My reason for visiting the house was to tune in to the feelings of the man. I wanted to get a sense of him, as I wrote an assignment about him and Flinders Petrie when I was studying archaeology.  But at that point I had only visited Egypt once and had no idea that I would end up living here.

The house was built in the traditional adobe-style, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It felt more like a villa than an Egyptian house but had many elements of both.

I could spend time here reading!!!

It felt cool and airy and spacious and I was completely envious!!!!  I could just imagine living there.   Writing, doing archaeology, working on my photos and painting. Bliss!!!

Carter’s bedroom.

Carter’s bedroom was lovely and most of the furniture was imported from England or built to British specifications. Everything was simple but comfortable but I wondered how much was really here when he was and how much was added later? Much like the National Trust reconstructions!

But I Love it!

Carter’s office was clean and light and led out onto a lovely verandah with large windows.

carter’s office.

It was here that he wrote his notes and corresponded and his typewriter is still here. (If it was really his).  I was itching to look in the photo-albums beneath the typewriter but was too afraid to!!!  If this was the national Trust I would probably be hung, drawn and quartered for even thinking about it!”!!

His type-writer…apparently!

There were lots of photos of him and Carnarvan and samples of his excavation drawings beneath glass on the desk. The entire place felt light. But I wonder what it felt like when he lived there?

Pecking Order? What Pecking Order?

Well, buying chickens has led to a whole host of interesting issues within the household! Here in our house there live 19 people: mother, father, four brothers and their families. Each family has its own flat. I live with my husband on the second floor opposite his brother, with his wife and daughter. On  the ground floor live two brothers and their wives and children.  Mother, 70, and Father, 90, hover on the ground floor as they were displaced as sons got married and wives were brought in to live in the family home.

Front Garden

Up until the point where we acquired our chickens Mother looked after the hens, and the women of the house threw them their scraps  She had bought fifty hens from the souk and housed them with the three rams. She looked after them all. But here in Upper Egypt chickens are not taken care of in the same way as chickens in the West. The same chickens which they get eggs from are the same chickens which they eat when they want to eat chicken.  To buy a broiler, or chicken specially reared to be eaten, costs 50LE. A lot of money when that same amount of money can feed you vegetables from the souk for nearly three weeks!!

So, when they fancied chicken they just went out to the hen house, grabbed a chicken by its legs or wings, brought it into the house and cut its throat. Halal meat! It didn’t matter whether this chicken was a good layer or not. It was not even considered. The flock of hens slowly dwindled and flock dynamics were in a constant state of flux!

When our friend Chris bought us our first three chickens and the rooster, we housed them separately so that I could raise them in the way that I always did in Ireland and in the UK.  We put them in their own enclosure and put a lock on the door so that no-one could help themselves to the eggs!! I wanted to go in everyday and collect them in one batch. Here the kids would randomly go and take whatever eggs they could find and bring them into their respective house. However, a rat decided she wanted to eat Mother’s eggs so we put her hens in with ours so that we could deal with the rat! The kids got the message pretty rapidly that this was now a no-go area!!! However, the adults were a different matter altogether! We gave a key to Mother so that she could continue to feed her hens and we tried different ways of allocating the eggs. None of which worked! The women of the house were used to going and taking the eggs whenever they wanted but now, they couldn’t do that. On top of that I noticed that the hens were dwindling in number and it turned out that they had been eating them! Unfortunately I don’t know if my new hens had gotten the chop as we had only gotten them and I didn’t recognise them yet, apart from the rooster and the one with the limp!

Hens in the Henhouse.

So we had a chat, or rather Omar did, and we put a stop to that!!!  Then we bought four new hens and I put them into a separate coup within the enclosure so that the other hens would get used to them! I wasn’t sure how the pecking order would establish itself as the flock was in a constant state of change and people here are really not all that interested in flock dynamics!!! But I wanted to ensure that the new hens integrated properly. When we first bought them we put them in the large, palm-tree cage where they felt at home. But because of the way chickens are handled here Mother would let them out, thinking that they needed space! However, the other hens pecked them badly and these newbies had lived in a small cage with other hens their entire lives, They were being sold as food! Letting them out of their, now larger, home was traumatic! I watched them for a couple of days, allowing them to be out as Mother wanted, but they were not eating or drinking as the other hens wouldn’t let them near the food!  They hid in the corner or in any dark place they could find. It was like watching freed prisoners of a concentration camp, who are so traumatised that being given freedom proves to be too difficult to manage. They feel safe in their confinement.

Improvised feeding!

I watched one of the hens as she ran around the edge of the hen house and it seems that she had a strange nervous habit. Like a tic! She would run and hop and try to peck at something in the air. I realised that because she was used to living in a tiny metal cage with no food for most of the day that she would try to catch flies as they flew by. It really was like looking at a freed concentration camp prisoner who is still acting as though they were captive.

Happy in their Confinement!

I put the four back in their run with a perch and they were perfectly happy! Hens here are not provided with nesting boxes or perches. But are allowed to eat greens.  We built them a couple of nest boxes, put straw in them and Omar made a traditional earthenware nest from a broken water jar!   But we are still trying to get the message across that the new hens need to be kept in the run! They keep being let out and so their food is eaten!! Yesterday I was concerned about the health of the strange hen with the nervous tic as she seemed to be quite weak and was hiding all the time. We took her upstairs and she ate and drank for a full half hour, non-stop! She is obviously not getting enough food! Then she pottered around quite happily, jumping up onto our bed and checking our carpet out! It is only when she is with the others that she is hiding. The other three are a little more confident but only barely. If they have been let out of their run they hide behind it. So I have to keep putting them in and explaining what we are doing. Well, Omar does that as my Arabic has not reached that level of proficiency yet!

I know! Chickens and carpets don’t mix!

Its a constant battle and a very frustrating one but we have to keep going. Hopefully, when they are producing more eggs they will see what we are trying to do and resentments that have built up from the women who are not free to take the eggs whenever they please will hopefully dissipate when they see that they are getting a lot more than they were before!