Counting Chickens

On the remote farms where community members lived before their displacement, families had flocks of hardy chickens for eggs and meat. In an effort to make up for the loss of these birds, the government has now funded a chicken project, with 300 laying hens. The goal of the project is an egg-a-day for each member of the community, but the pure-bred hens are picky eaters, and aren’t laying well in their big communal pen, so today the chickens are being counted and moved to smaller pens maintained by each family.

By the time we return in 2006, the families have gone back to their flocks of scraggly, bug-eating, tree-roosting campesino chickens–chickens that know how to get along in a world without fancy feed, regular doses of expensive antibiotics and excess coddling.