The Sidmouth-based Donkey Sanctuary celebrated International Day of the Donkey on Saturday 8th May by talking to 350 of its supporters taking part in this year’s Donkey Week about the overseas aspect of its work.

The headquarters of the Sidmouth-based Donkey Sanctuary is not only home to over 400 donkeys but also houses an Overseas Department who work hard to improve the welfare of donkeys in the many different situations facing them and their owners throughout the world. A mobile unit working in Mexico recently met two working animals who contribute to their owners’ lives in very different ways.

Dozing on my night flight back to London, my mind flits to Victor, a 6-year-old with a bright face who loves school and journeys 4 miles to get there, arriving each morning before his teachers. I see a lone boy leaving his house before sunrise, his donkey waddling from side to side, the white specks around his eyes and the band across his muzzle glowing in the eerie darkness. Only the cicadas seem be awake at that hour. But it’s strange because the village doesn’t look like the tiny roadside settlement of El Diamante, population 55, where I know Victor lives with his grandfather. The small adobe lime house I watch Victor leave, with its tin corrugated roof, resembles more Romana’s house in Ursulo Galvan, Romana the middle-aged woman who rides each day Pelusa, or Shaggy, to collect firewood. Romana doesn’t have a car so she rides Shaggy alongside Zoila, her daughter-in-law, who helps Romana stack the wood on Shaggy.

The sun is shining gloriously but at this early hour the high-altitude air is chilly. In the distance the Nevado de Toluca looms, an enormous volcanic mass, Mexico’s fourth-tallest mountain, about the size of Mont Blanc, and in the crystal light it seems to float in a timeless unreality. Trucks, trailers and beat-up vans, bulging with livestock, pass by and whip up dust and roadside flotsam and the debris swirls around amid an odour of fried chicken and animal dung. Cowboys yell against a din of mooing cows, bleating sheep, and braying donkeys; people hover around stalls selling saddles and stirrups, sombreros and Stetsons, ponchos and potatoes, and tiny indigenous women wrinkled by aridity and age peddle tamales and tortillas. It’s a scene out of the Wild West, a Wild West Mexican-style, 60 miles west of Mexico City, at San Bernabe market in Ixtlahuaca, at a dizzying 9,500 feet above sea level, and here I’m the only gringo in sight.

Several days on, we’re on the road again. This time Doctor Mariano Hernández Gil is at the helm of the Donkey Sanctuary’s activities in the East-Central state region. We’re bombing through luscious rolling countryside not far from Veracruz, a port city of half-a-million people in the Gulf of Mexico. Mango trees and fields of sugar cane fly past our window, and there are tangerine and banana groves everywhere, and papayas and avocados, and almonds, and guavas and lemons—it’s a tropical cornucopia outside. “Veracruz is a very rich province,” Mariano says, “rich enough to be its own country.” Alongside fertile soils and hot, humid weather, there’s also petrol and nuclear power, and beautiful beaches and gem colonial architecture. But, as the handsome thirty-something equine vet points out, in the villages there are very poor people, and very poor donkeys.

The Donkey Sanctuary’s white mini-bus, a kind of magical medical travelling minstrel show, takes off next day for the city’s northernmost reaches, just beyond its limits, in the state of Mexico, which wraps itself around Mexico City—Distrito Federal, or DF—like an enormous horseshoe.