When I retired from my job as a Regional Welfare Officer for The Donkey Sanctuary I was fortunate enough to be invited to become a Trustee for the charity. This new role was to lead to a most exciting trip to Kenya with the CEO David Cook to look at the work the charity does there.

The charity has been working in Kenya since its founder Dr Elizabeth Svendsen visited there and became aware of the great number of problems facing the donkey population. To assist this she began a relationship with the KSPCA which has lasted for 21 years, the charity funding all the donkey welfare work that the KSPCA does and assisting with training and back up from the UK. Four vets and a number of veterinary assistants are funded by the Donkey Sanctuary and do a huge amount of work with mobile clinics treating donkeys and doing educational visits to schools. In addition to this there is a harnessing project which is based at the KSPCA headquarters. This is also funded by the Sanctuary and make harness from locally sourced materials, its aims being to try to improve the standard of harnessing used on the donkey carts which can be found all over Kenya.

As well as the work with the KSPCA the Donkey Sanctuary also has a base in Lamu where work on the islands off the coast of Kenya are covered.

David and I began our visit by driving north with three vets and a veterinary assistant from Nairobi to Isiolo. We stayed here prior to driving onto Samburro National Park where there was to be a clinic to treat the donkeys owned by the pastoral people. These are nomadic folk who travel all over central and northern Kenya with their herds of cattle, goats and donkeys, the donkeys' role is to carry water.

After driving over some of the worst roads in the world we arrived at our designated meeting point. I could not believe the number of donkeys arriving to be treated and immediately the words of one of my former colleagues in the welfare department, Charles Courtney, came back to me. He told me that when he had visited Kenya and whilst working in the bush a group of donkeys came towards him that were the finest he had ever seen. In your dreams was my reply. You want to go to the Breed Societies Championship Show and see some proper donkeys. When I next meet up with Charles I will have to apologise to him for on that morning I saw hundreds of donkeys that would leave most of our past champion donkeys in the shade.

I suppose had I thought about it I should not have been surprised, the pastoral people's life style has not changed for hundreds of years. They roam over hundreds if not thousands of miles. Their donkeys have to be fit and not have genetic faults. If they have cow hocks or plait they will not outrun predators such as hyenas. What I was looking at were donkeys developed over hundreds of years by natural selection, the nearest thing I would imagine to the Nubian wild ass that used to roam the same terrain. Another thing that surprised me was that out of the hundreds of donkeys we saw nearly all of them were mares, lots of them with foals at foot. After making enquiries I found that there was a good trade in selling stallion donkeys to the towns where they were preferred as working animals, so the chances of inbreeding were also reduced drastically.

That morning the team wormed and treated seven hundred and twenty donkeys. It was an experience I will never forget. One young girl had walked 35 donkeys over 15 kilometres to be treated and then walked them back afterwards. The work that the team got through was incredible. Nothing seemed to faze them no matter how serious it was.

The biggest problem facing the pastoral people is the lack of water and the back breaking job of getting it by having to fill buckets from down a well over thirty feet deep and passing the buckets from hand to hand to fill a water trough at the top where literally hundreds of thirsty donkeys, cows, goats and camels are waiting to drink. When we were there it was just coming to the end of the rainy season and the rivers had already dried up so they face a desperate nine months until next April when the rains usually starts again.

The following day we visited the township of Isiolo to hold a clinic. This time there were lots of wounds as the carts and harness they use leave a great deal to be desired. The donkeys are nearly always driven as pairs. The only harness they have is lengths of old rags wrapped round their necks and round the T section of the pole on the cart so it does not take a great deal of imagination to guess what the injuries are. One thing that was amazing to see was a pair of donkeys being driven at a gallop through traffic with no reins or bits and only guided by being tapped on the side with a long piece of stick; over to you Debbie Street, beat that.

From Isiolo it was a long drive back to Nairobi then a short flight out to the island Lamu off the coast of Kenya where the only form of transport of any kind is donkeys and the whole economy depends upon it. They are kept busiest on the docks and on building work. Sadly it was not unusual to see a donkey with three 50 kg bags of cement on their backs or panniers piled high with damp sand or building blocks. The Sanctuary is kept fully employed treating these donkeys not just on Lamu but also on the neighbouring islands where once again donkeys are the only form of transport. The Lamu Sanctuary employs part time trained welfare assistants on each of the islands to do normal run of the mill treatments or minor injuries but the vet in Lamu is always on hand to come out by speedboat in an emergency.

The Sanctuary also has a small farm on Lamu where injured donkeys are taken to recover and foals that are orphaned go to live. Any foals that go there are not allowed back to their owners until they are at least three years old.

My trip came to an end all too quickly but it left me with some wonderful memories. The longest lasting will I am sure be the day we spent at Samburro with the pastoral people and all those hundreds of magnificent donkeys.

Published in Donkey Breed Society Magazine, 2009.