Walking the quiet streets of Dahab in Egypt, we saw a Bedouin woman milking a goat… onto the street. No receptacle to collect the milk, no kid (baby goat) to drink the milk, just letting the milk spill on the street and soak into the dirt. “What a waste!” I thought, “that’s very unlike the Bedouins who know the value of every drop since they live in harshly dry weather”. So we asked: “Why are you throwing the milk away?”, “Because the goat is sick” the Bedouin woman answered. Drinking the milk of a sick goat makes you sick; makes perfect sense. The Bedouin woman, who probably never learnt to read and write, knows and lives by this simple fact. But are we, city consumers, aware of how the health (or lack thereof) of our food sources affects us? We consider ourselves educated, worldly, scientific, smart yet when it comes to simple natural laws of cause and effect affecting our health, we’re very ignorant and utterly clueless. We accept the harshly brutal treatment of animals from which we get our meat, milk, cheese and eggs. Any Bedouin in their right mind would probably not touch that food. Yet we pay our hard earned cash for it and consume it beyond our capacity. The sad story doesn’t end there. Our irrational fear, manufactured scarcity and insatiable greed left nothing unharmed: plants, animals, fish, water, air, soil, Earth. We are caught in a cycle of abuse without even realizing it. Blinded in our survival mode. Numbed by a plethora of distractions, that keep getting more potent. How can we break the cycle? Where’s the way out? Can we save our home?
The simple Bedouin woman knows many of the answers if we are willing to learn. Even though she won’t drink the milk because the goat is sick, she still milked the goat to alleviate its burden. Respect for life, in all its forms, is lesson #1.#dahab #egypt #food #respectlife #bedouin #travel #travelblog #westandinlove
Unconditional Love 