In the old
days the first you saw on arriving at a village was a heap of animal dung where
hens scratched for food while the women of the village busy making flat cakes
from the dung of the village’s cattle. Left to dry in the sun the animal dung
was then burnt as a source of heat and cooking. When mixed with mud and straw the
dung formed building material for their houses and animal sheds. The use of
dung to make building material dates back to prehistory and many cultures
traditionally used dung as a source of heat such as the tribes of Native
Americans who roamed the prairies and it is still used in the villages of India
(Photo above). Buffalo, cow and camel chips were the source of heat for
countless generations. In dry countries dung was also a source of cash and all
members of families that kept flocks and herds would collect dry animal
droppings in sacks for sale in towns and cities.
No doubt there are young people today who have
no knowledge of this and would be disgusted at the thought of using dung to cook
their food yet this was a vital source of heat and village women worked hard
not only to feed their family but to produce the means of cooking the food.
Today we are
all too dependent on gas, oil and electricity to give us heat but we are then
relying on fossil fuels which are a limited resource. In addition burning gas
and oil is polluting our planet and causing global changes in our weather and
that all countries are looking to alternative energy sources such as
hydroelectricity, wind and solar power, but the village women were always using
a renewable energy source.
Today we are
reliant on the oil industry for power and today’s villages have no dung heaps
where the cockerel’s crow heralds the dawn of another day and the village women
gather to make the fuel they need. Indeed there are no cockerels or hens to be
seen in most of our villages and the outskirts of a village is marked by piles
of plastic waste that litters the once productive land. I am sure that a time
will come when people will look once more to the traditional source of power
that was used in villages and will also turn again to agriculture. Then we may
see villagers using gas and heat produced in their village from the dung of
their flocks that is processed in a digester system to give methane. There are
villages in the developing world where this system has already been developed.
After all necessity is the mother of invention.
Women were,
and still are, the power behind the villages’ existence. Salutations to those
ladies.
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