Aims

• To provide education on animal welfare and husbandry for local children between the ages of 8-12 years
• To help children understand that all animals have feelings, feel pain and deserve respect
• To encourage children to be kind and respectful to all animals
• To enable children to understand the importance of caring for working animals
• To persuade children to actively promote animal welfare in their local community

Objectives

• To provide a safe, purposeful environment that promotes learning
• To ensure the childrens’ experience at ACE is both fun and memorable
• To make available a vibrant space with purposeful display material
• To ensure all learning styles are addressed-visual, auditory and kinesthetic (through song, DVD and handling)
• To provide follow-up material for teachers to use in the classroom
• To present each child with an ACE badge to commemorate their experience
• To encourage children to write stories/draw pictures for competition entry

Overview

Education at ACE is now in it’s sixth month and has proved highly successful.  Every day from Monday - Thursday, eighty children arrive at the centre for their lesson.  They are from a different school each day and are taught in two groups of forty (the first group arriving at 9am, the second at 11am).

Wael, our Arabic speaking volunteer teacher, settles the children into the education room,  whereupon he begins the lesson.

Through question and answer technique he is able to ascertain how many children own/work with animals and how many believe animals have feelings.  Sadly, most hands go up for the former and very few for the latter.

Throughout the lesson Wael actively involves the children to ensure they are engaged.  One of the most effective parts of the lesson is when he demonstrates that animals cannot speak.  Wael chooses a child to come to the front of the class and he puts his hands over their mouth.  He then asks the child to tell the class that he is hungry, hot, tired or in pain.  Obviously the child is unable to do this and the attempts often provide much laughter in the classroom.  However, the point is well made and by using visual, inclusive techniques students are more likely to absorb the information.

Children are then introduced to a DVD highlighting the plight of the Egyptian tortoise.  It is a cartoon story that is fun and educational.  Following this children are encouraged to learn the ‘donkey’ song and then participate in singing it as a class.  The words of the song are in Arabic (written by Wael) and the music is in a Western Pop style (written by Julie Clarke).  Children leave the classroom singing the song and some of our staff have heard it being sung in the local villages.  The words of the song describe the feelings of a donkey from his own mouth telling of his disappointment and sadness at his owner’s neglect when he works so hard for him.  The donkey asks for mercy with specific references to the teachings of The Koran.

Often the most exciting part of their time at ACE is when the children are taken to see the animals.  They are each given a piece of carrot to feed to a horse or donkey.

This part of their visit is very closely supervised by members of staff to ensure the safety of the children.  They are all shown the correct way to feed a horse or donkey (with a flat hand).  It is surprising how many of them are nervous at this point but with encouragement they all overcome their fear and can even stroke the animals.  This not only encourages and shows them how to form a bond with animals, but also reinforces our main objective-that animals deserve love and respect.

All of the children leave ACE with smiles on their faces and vivid memories of their time here.  They leave the staff of ACE with hope for a better future for the animals of Egypt.

Education at ACE

Imagine a class of forty enthusiastic, smiling faces sitting in front of you.  They have come on a special outing travelling on a bus through the sugar cane fields past where their fathers and brothers work.  They are coming to visit the animal hospital that looks after the animals that work with their fathers and brothers.  Without this work there would be no trip today-there would be no school, there would be no food.

These children only have food to eat and are only able to go to school because their families rely on working farm animals to help earn a living.  When they play in the village street they are playing amongst dogs, cats, donkeys and horses.  Animals are an integral part of their daily lives-part of the landscape of their everyday existence.

The children and their families are not wealthy.  They wear shoes that have no soles and clothes that are threadbare held together by rough stitching.  Some of them have a packed lunch with them-one dry bread roll and some water in a plastic bag.  All of them are smiling and all happy to be out of school and their village visiting a place they have heard so much about.

We ask them to put up their hands if they have animals at their home-nearly all hands go up.  We ask them to put up their hands if they think these animals feel pain, happiness, sadness, hunger, thirst or love-not one hand goes up.

This is the enemy we face here every day at ACE - a deep-rooted belief that animals have no feelings - that they are here to work from dawn until dusk until the day they fall down and die.

The challenge is how do we change this?  How do we alter centuries of strange illogical traditions inextricably linked with beliefs handed down through generations, and old outdated superstitions?

The answer is education!

Here at ACE we firmly believe that education is the only thing that is going to change the lives of the animals in Egypt.  After many years of liaising with the Egyptian Government we finally had our first class of forty children arrive in November 2008.  Since then we have seen three hundred and twenty different children every week.

They travel to us on noisy, rickety buses and arrive singing songs with their heads hanging out of the windows. They are given a lesson in our classroom by an Arabic speaking teacher who is able to introduce to them an entirely new concept-animals have feelings and deserve respect.  The kinder you are to them-the kinder they will be to you.  The better they are looked after the harder they will work for you.  In short-they can be your friends.

The children take part in discussion and role play activities.  They watch a DVD and learn to sing a specially composed song which highlights the terrible working conditions of the many donkeys here.  We are able to make children aware of the teachings of the Koran and the Bible regarding the care of all God’s creatures.

After an hour in the classroom the children are ready to explore ACE - they are very excited!  We take them first to the shower areas to reinforce the fact that keeping an animal clean is often the best medicine - it’s prevents sores and infections before they occur.

We take the children to our inpatients department and each child is given a piece of carrot or a horse biscuit so that they feed the horses and donkeys.  For children that are surrounded by working animals every day and often work them themselves, it is surprising to see how many hands shake when they lift up the piece of carrot to the horses mouth.  They tremble and giggle nervously when you ask them to stroke the horse or donkey.  It is painfully apparent that they have never shown an animal love.  The animal inpatients love the visits from the children - it seems there is a special connection between the innocence of children and the innocence of animals.  They both recognise a kindred spirit.

We leave the inpatients department amongst a sea of smiling faces and nervous chatter. These are happy children having conquered their fears and shown love to an animal.

Now it’s time to meet the tortoises.  The children sit quietly in a big circle on the grass in our garden and we bring the tortoises to sit in the middle of the circle.  The children and the tortoises love this petting time - we encourage them to touch the tortoise gently or to pick them up if they are brave enough.  There is again much giggling and trembling hands as they pluck up the courage to touch the moving stones!

Before they leave us every child is given a badge - they ask if it is theirs to keep and whether they can wear it on other clothes too!

The noisy bus leaves us and trundles down the road with the children hanging out of the windows shouting goodbye.  They return to their villages filled with new ideas and happy memories.  We hope they can pass them on-both to their parents and to future generations.  We hope animals will be loved and cared for instead of neglected and abused.  We hope Egypt will be filled with animals that are happy in their work with owners that are proud of them and appreciate them.

We hope one day to imagine a class of forty children where every hand goes up…

Julie Clarke, Regular Volunteer & Assistant Teacher

We do all we can to educate the children on an educational visit to ACE, educating the Egyptian children in the best way of looking after all their animals and with more school groups coming to ACE we can hopefully point them in the right direction.  We do realise that spending a few hours at ACE on one school trip will not be enough so we are aiming at a full education programme for schools in and around Luxor.

It is necessary to teach all the young children how to care for and treat their animals kindly.  We are actively pursuing this through the Ministry of Education.