Chickens, Chickens, Chickens

This week we have been joined by a small group of students from the University of Tennessee Knoxville - Kelly (professor), AJ, Leslie and Elena. We started speaking with a core group from UT over a year and half ago for the purpose of targeting specific agricultural needs in the communities we work with. We have discussed everything from soil, to corn, to worms, to water harvesting, to animals and in this case specifically chickens.

For those who know the story, this does not include chasing down wild chickens! In most of the areas we work, chicken serves as the primary meat eaten by the families and thus, they are very important to their quality of life as they provide food and when raising chickens to sell, also provide an important source of income for families. In discussions with various communities we have seen much interest, primarily from women, in the care and raising healthy chickens. Thus, we locked into this idea with UT Knoxville and specifically with Kelly whose specialty is animal science.

This group developed a program to help educate interested people in the proper care and methods of raising chickens in a healthy environment, allowing them to have the full benefit of healthy chickens. They came this week to teach a seminar to the women of Xepocol in these methods including proper couping, feeding, isolation of sick chickens and mainly immunization to prevent massive epidemics that result in high mortality. Interesting enough, one of the areas of Xepocol just recently had an epidemic that killed around 100 chickens in various homes, primarily in 2 or 3 homes who raise chickens for income.

On Tuesday they purchases supplies and demonstrated how to make isolation cages and taught a class. Then on Wednesday they prepared some more isolation cages and also a chicken feeder which allows the chicks to eat without pesky bullies eating all of the food and then did a class on disease and immunization. On Thursday, they went around to the various homes and assisted in immunizing 335 chickens.

Here Tomas decided to isolate his little brother Josue.

Part of this program was to demonstrate that providing immunizations can be inexpensive should everyone work together. Traditionally, most people go to get the immunization just to learn that it costs about $2.50, Q16 and to vaccinate 10-15 chickens, that is a large expense for them. However, what they have not realized is each vaccine ampule will vaccinate 150 chickens. So if you go in together to maximize the number to vaccinate, you can do this for as little as Q.12 cents each!

The immunization is good for 3 months and then they must keep repeating the cycle until the chicken is killed and eaten or sold - to be eaten. We identified some women in the community to help organize this effort, so "primero Dios", they will continue the immunizations. We plan to follow-up in 3 months to help this be a successful program. One of the women identified to help organize is our health promoter's, Gaspar, wife. She is very organized to we hope to see a positive result.

We had a few laughs when they explained that if a few chickens get sick they should kill them right away and eat them if they are of the age! :) They did not want to accept that one very much, but we did tell them we could come to the party to enjoy the fried chicken together.

Thank you UT for a great week!