First contacts

Thursday afternoon we had a meeting with Dr. Ghalia Drissi at Allo-Veto Clinic. She is Jaber’s veterinary school colleague and a former volunteer for the donkey NGO we had planned to work with. She is very enthusiastic about animal welfare and wants to help us organize events and participate in activities for the donkeys. Community development is also important to her and she would like to introduce us to another group she volunteers with called Machrek Eshams. They have a meeting next week we can attend.

We saw a few animals as we drove around Ariana, a middle class section of the city. There were two horses with carts in the midst of automobile traffic in the business section as well as many free roaming neighborhood dogs and cats. In the hills on the city perimeter, there was a shepherd with about eight sheep grazing on the edge of an upper class residential neighborhood. 

Our last meeting of the day was with Dr. Olfa Abid at the Anivet Clinique Veterinaire in Menzah. She is Jaber’s former employer and had been very involved in the donkey NGO but recently left the group. She has contacts and data from previous veterinary service events and will share this info with us. The former NGO provided services to the donkeys but did not have an overarching agenda. She felt most of the communities she had worked with were very welcoming of outside help and we discussed the objectives of our project.

Olfa would like to continue serving the donkeys and offered her assistance in organizing, networking and delivering services and education. We all agreed starting simple with rabies vaccination and deworming would be the best way to gain trust. While we are providing these services we can be assessing the donkeys’ condition and begin conversations with community members as to what issues (either for themselves or the donkeys) they perceive as problems.

We discussed two specific locations that would be the most amenable to hosting an event. She emphasized the importance of planning ahead. The donkey owners that show up all want to be served so we have to make sure we have enough manpower to see all the donkeys in a day.

Our meeting went so well she invited us to dinner Monday night to review the boxes of records she has on donkeys from previous events.