Bikes, children, and other hazards

["Maryanne Stroud Gabbani" <gabbani@starnet.com.eg>]

First, I want to thank everyone for their messages last week. It really
meant a lot. I've been unbelievably fortunate in my life to be surrounded by
such great friends as well as my husband's enormous family, who are also an
immense support. Having gotten through the preliminary sorting out of his
affairs, I now have some time to relax a bit and I found that I was needing
the lovely distraction of mail again. Got back to see the tail end of the
hazard discussion and I had to laugh. A few days ago, I came in from
meetings with business people and my kids met me at the door with my riding
clothes and told me to get to the stable immediately and not come back for
at least 3 hours!

Needless to say, I obeyed willingly and I'm now working my time to include
regular horse time. I've had my horses at a riding club with arenas and
access to the desert for years, but when Dory broke her sesamoid I moved her
to a nearby farm stable that had some great small rehab paddocks. (No room
to run around, but she could watch everything going on) And now we are
riding for the next six months or so on the trails and dirt roads among the
farms. "Farms" here are tiny plots of land with sheds made of old cornstalks
for the water buffalo and mud brick (or if you're rich) concrete block
houses that always have goats and chickens running in and out. School is out
now so there are a million children running around (whenever they can escape
mom and dad) catching minnows in irrigation ditches ...popping up suddenly
from the reeds... flying homemade kites and herding all sorts of wonderful
animals. On any given ride we have to walk past at least 25 buffalo, 40
donkeys, a few camels, tractors, dump trucks, pick ups, bicycles, motor
bikes, donkey and horse carts, soccer matches, piles of burning trash,
flocks of geese, ducks, sheep and goats. Oh, yeah, I forgot all the farm
dogs. Anyone want bombproof horses? I've got as close as they come. BUT,
yesterday as we were walking along Dory suddenly saw a baby donkey that had
been lying in the long grass in the sun next to a canal raise its head and
she did one of the largest sidesteps I've ever seen. Oddly enough the little
4 yr old stallion who was walking right next to us didn't even raise an
equine eyebrow. Go figure. No one is ever bombproof completely, but I've
always found that if I assumed something wasn't a problem, my horses assume
the same, and I've made it a point that whenever I saw something weird, we
went to take a look. A lot of people thought I was nuts, but now they see
the results. Arabs, at least here, have incredible curiousity, so it makes
sense to use it and let them learn to use it constructively rather than by
inventing monsters. There are enough real monsters out there that they might
as well learn that the world on the whole is a friendly place.

Wow. You can't tell much that I've had a week off from talking horses.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
gabbani@starnet.com.eg