Leigh in Azerbaijan

Life here is fundamentally different than back home with the attitude to animals.  Wild cats and dogs roam the city but very few keep them as pets. They are always thin and sickly. On the road to school there are several packs of dogs that are seen on the bus each morning, some limping, all dirty, all looking for food. I’m not sure why in Istanbul and Baku they don’t put down starving packs of dogs. I went looking on Wikipedia and found this:

The majority of both Sunni and Shi’a Muslim jurists consider dogs to be ritually unclean, … Muhammad didn’t like dogs according to Sunni tradition, and most practicing Muslims do not have dogs as pets…However, outside their ritual uncleanness, Islamic fatwas, or rulings, enjoin that dogs be treated kindly or else be freed. Muslims generally cast dogs in a negative light because of their ritual impurity. …  It is said that angels do not enter a house which contains a dog. Though dogs are not allowed for pets, they are allowed to be kept if used for work, such as guarding your house or farm, or when used for hunting purposes.

One story in Istanbul is that many years ago they rounded up all the street dogs and put them on an island out in the Sea of Marmara to let them die. I guess actually wielding the knife would make them guilty of not treating dogs kindly. Now, in Istanbul, there are programs to innoculate the dogs before releasing them to the streets again.

On Thursday Michael found himself watching a dog die, presumably poisoned,  while he was outside the school gate getting some “fresh air”.  I noticed the body was still there Friday afternoon in the summer sun.

Trucks continue to remove many more tons of soil from the building site.  It’s been enough to raise the land by a couple of metres a 200x 30m section of land between the school and the valley.   We don’t know how long the work will continue, given that the Director has signalled that there isn’t sufficient money to complete the project at this stage.

More photos from my walk to school.

At this stage I’m about 13 mins from school. The bulding exteriors are sad but the homes are probably fine inside.

It’s nothing for people to light a little fire and throw plastic onto it which then fills the neighbourhood with acrid smoke.

Each apartment originally had a verandah but they’ve all been converted to extra rooms, hence the patchwork finish.

Now begins the 10 minute walk along the valley to school, which is the white buildings below the highrises top left, .  People throw their rubbish on the edge of the valley and every now and again someone puts a match to it.  Consequently on still mornings the valley fills with blue smoke and levels off at approximately 20m up.  It makes walking the last km a little more hazardous.

One of the residences along the valley.  The slabs up against the bus are lifted cow dung from a barn .