Sometimes things happen in Guinea that are both frustrating
and funny.
To start, I was coming home a few weeks ago from my Pular
class in the neighboring village. As
I’ve mentioned before, livestock here in Guinea are free range, which means
they don’t respect traffic laws very well.
Usually, when they see something bigger coming, the animal which is
standing in the middle of the road or path moves. It sometimes helps as well to give a shout (or
a honk of your horn) in advance to alert the animal of your presence.
On this particular day, there was a medium size sheep in my
path, and I started shouting as I approached the animal. Unfortunately, the animal just stood
there. As I realized the sheep wasn’t
going to move, I had to make a quick decision, right, left, or straight
ahead. I chose left. Unfortunately, the sheep also chose the same
direction, and it was quickly prone with my front tire over its
mid-section. After a quick moment of,
“What the heck just happened to me?”, the sheep got up and trotted off. After verifying that the animal was okay, I
got myself upright and started to move forward again.
As I looked in the path ahead of me, what I saw this time
wasn’t an animal, but a child. She was
staring right at me, and saw what had just happened. I pointed to the sheep and tried to explain
in my best French that the animal that I had just run over was okay. As I pedaled off, the child quickly moved off
to the side and didn’t respond when I said Bonjour.
Now on to the chickens.
My village, like all other villages in Guinea, allows their chickens to
range free. This includes the baby
hatchlings. However, in areas where the
dry season is hot and long, the wild birds tend to supplement their diet with
village chicklets. So a hen may lay and
hatch 10 chicks, but after 1 month or two, you would be lucky to be left with
even one. In the rainy season, the wild
birds can easily find other things to eat, so the village chicklets are safe. But between January to May, it is difficult
to increase the size of your flock.
One of my first suggestions to my counterpart when I was
installed at site was to guard the hatchlings in a separate hut until they were
1-2 months old. Once they had reached a certain
size, they would be too big for the wild birds to steal, and thus continue to
live and grow into adulthood. After
losing yet another clutch of chicklets in February, my counterpart decided to
try my idea. So in late march, 12 chicklets
were born, and they stayed in a hut normally used for grain storage. For the first 3 weeks, only 1 chicklet was
lost. Then, another hen had 5 chicklets,
and they joined the hut with the others.
But then the rat (maybe) came back, as my counterpart found a headless
chiklet one morning. Over the next week,
I think one other chicklet died as well.
But then one day after coming home from Pular class, I
stepped on a chicklet while trying to get my bicycle in the grain hut where I
usually kept it. I left the dead
chicklet aside while I dropped my things off at my hut. After getting briefly sidetracked, I returned
to the grain hut only to find a headless chicklet. That certainly wasn’t a rat! One of these hens had developed a taste for
chickens. A couple days later, 3
chicklets were killed by one of the hens.
Finally, the second hen (which originally had 5 chicklets) was left with
only one chicklet, and was jettisoned from the hut. (Yes, her remaining chicklet eventually got
eaten by a bird.) So we learned it
doesn’t work to well to have two new mother hens share the same hut.
The other hen was also eventually jettisoned from the hut,
which became guests sleeping quarters during Easter celebrations, (prematurely
in my opinion.) At last count, she had
two chicklets remaining. I will have
another post dedicated to my project to solve this problem.
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