20.2.14 Thursday. Kaur and Jamwelly

Doug and Sandra arrived this morning to travel with Steve and I to Jamwelly.  Fiona is still at Nemasu and was staying alone for the 2 days we are away.  We loaded the personal items onto the truck and set off on the south bank for the ferry crossing at Soma.  The travelling is much easier now that the road is finished and we managed to reach the ferry without incident, there was more traffic than there has been over the last few weeks and we queued for an hour before crossing.  In Farafenni we went for our usual lunch of omelette sandwich and coffee before buying vegetables for our evening meal.  Steve and Doug shopped for rice and potatoes and we packed them on the truck and set off for Kaur.  The road is not busy in this part of the country, we just have to look out for donkeys, sheep, cattle and goats running across the road.  We arrived in Kaur and went straight to the Lower Basic School where the builders are converting the old meeting room into a library, the windows and tiles were off loaded and then Steve and I went into the town with Kebba to source timber and corrugate for the roof repairs.  This proved to be a fruitless exercise and we need to go to Farafenni tomorrow, which is a much larger town and more likely to stock what we need.  We went back to the school, inspected the work done so far by the builders and then set off to Jamwelly to spend the night in the school.  The journey takes us across the main road and onto a dirt track to the village, just as we arrived at the dirt track we found a small group of boys torturing a very small puppy, very tightly tying bands of cloth to its back legs and dragging it through the dirt on its stomach.  They said they wanted to kill it!  As you can imagine as animal lovers we stopped and rescued the tiny puppy which was squealing loudly and obviously terrified.  I picked it up and we took it in the car to the school where we were able to discover that its legs were not broken, but just badly bruised, but the puppy was traumatised and very frightened..  We found an old banana box and made it into a bed, much to the amusement of Channeh the head teacher. (dogs here sleep in the sand or wherever they can find)  Doug, Sandra and Steve went off on a bird walk whilst I stayed at the school with the puppy which is too small to be away from it’s mother, and waited for Kebba to arrive to sort the wages.  The puppy went to sleep and seemed to settle down, so we have decided to give it to the school for the pupils to look after and learn about animal welfare. Kebba arrived and we sorted out the wages and the bills for the week.  The building work should be finished by Wednesday.  The wanderers returned and we all had dinner before retiring for the night.