Not even a full day in and this week is already interesting. Today I went out with Pastor Daniel, our field guy, to the first group of chicken houses. After a brief pause (waiting for the processing plant to pay us), we placed chicks today. Normally we would only place 2,000 but today we placed 4,000 because we have a special order asking for more chickens. That means two houses were filled, and two farmers split each house. At this stage, each farmer only uses about 1/3 of their space because the chicks are quite small (1 day old). As they grow, they will be given more room to move about and the temperature will slowly decrease as they become capable of keeping themselves warm.
Naturally, being a philosopher, I forgot my camera (I've got to blame it on something). Luckily, I'll be going back out with Tinashe on Wednesday, so I can promise you many pictures then. The area is really quite stunning and the houses are really neat to see.
The women were friendly as always, but most of the conversation was in SiSwati, so I mainly observed. I did hold a couple chicks, which is about as exciting as you'd imagine (apparently exciting enough to write home about).
One random note: When I went with Tinashe out to the World Vision event, we passed a tiny rural village (more like a wide spot in the road) with a little shop. The name of it was "Hitler's General Store" and, had I not been seat belted in, I would probably have fallen out of the car. Tinashe saw what I was staring at and laughed. He correctly guessed that such a store would be highly offensive where I come from, but apparently it's not so uncommon to name a man Hitler here. Looking back, I find it very funny that there are probably only a few places named after Hitler in the world and this one is visited almost exclusively by people who are anything but members of the Aryan Master Race. At least it was worth a chuckle.
Anyway, pictures to arrive Wednesday!
-Ben
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