Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk
06 September '10
On a Friday evening on the edge of Gaza City, the tables at Faisal are beginning to fill up.
A group of young women wearing brightly-patterned headscarves and high heels beneath their jilbabs order ice cream and fruit cocktails; elsewhere men are puffing on water pipes.
But the main attraction is not the company, the menu, nor the refreshing evening breeze that blows off the nearby Mediterranean coast. People come to watch the horses.
Faisal is Gaza's only riding club, open for the past five years and, despite the Israeli blockade and its grim economic consequences, doing rather well. It started with a nucleus of Arabian horses bred in Gaza, but this has been recently supplemented with horses from Egypt and Syria imported through the tunnels dug beneath the border at the southern end of the Strip.
"We choose the horses over the internet, looking at video clips," said chief trainer Ahmed Abd Ali. "We also take advice from our trading partners in Egypt."
The horses are led through the bigger tunnels, but even then it is sometimes a tight fit, according to Abd Ali. Some reach the Gaza end with minor scratches, and some appear a little frightened by the journey. "But we have no choice, there is no other way to get them," he said. The animals are already trained but the trainers allow them a few weeks to recover from the tunnel ordeal before putting them to work.
(Read full story)
If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment