Vaccine Time

Most birds are majestic creatures which gracefully glide across the sky and are capable of focusing so intently on the land below that is appears they are gazing into the soul of Mother Nature.

A chicken trying to avoid capture so it can receive an essential vaccination to prevent its death is not as pleasant a sight. In fact, if you are the big tall, slow white guy, who can barely string 3 sentences of the local language together, trying to catch said chicken for 5-10 minutes, you can almost sense Charles Darwin turning over in his grave. To be fair, we had instructed our teaching group to tell their students to KEEP YOUR CHICKENS INSIDE, but we also said a lot of other things that day, they were bound to forget something. Needless to say, we did not vaccinate a lot of chickens on the first day.

However, things picked up quite quickly. We have now vaccinated over 600 chickens between the 55 farmers we are working with and are going back tomorrow to finish with the last few houses. Interestingly enough, there has been quite a dramatic increase in the number of birds per farm especially considering we surveyed all of these people less than a month ago. I like to think that they have just been diligently following our advice and that this rapid progress is simply an indication of our surreal poultry education methods rather than the more likely explanation of a suspect addition of birds from their neighbours...

Joking aside, there has been some notable improvements in poultry husbandry within the village. It was a very proud moment when we saw our vaccinator-teacher-student system being put to work in the past few days as Monica and I were able to simply observe the process instead of feeling inclined to assist directly with the vaccinations. I believe that the group of people we have selected is a responsible and motivated team who will be able to continue on with their duties during the months that we will not be here. We have almost now finished our education materials which will be left with each one of these people allowing for better communication between all parties throughout the year as well as some built in mechanisms of evaluation for future project work.