Las gallinas

         These are our chickens! I have to take care of chickens! Isn't that hilarious?? It's like I'm in Iowa or something. Two weeks ago Bill sent me an email with a list of things to do around the property, and to my bemusement, one of the items was to purchase and maintain chickens for a constant supply of eggs (we eat a lot of eggs). So I put the chicken chore far down the list figuring it would take some asking around to find out what kind of chickens to buy (who even knew there were different types of chickens), where I can buy them, how many to buy, and how to maintain them, cause before this I'm not even sure I'd ever even seen a live chicken. Then three or four days ago I was picking up lunch from Milania's (the woman who cooks for the groups when they are here), and thought to ask her about the chickens because I knew she had a bunch of her own. I usually pick up lunch around 12, and by 2 o'clock that same day when I went back to return her tupperware, she had like 15 chickens lined up for me to buy! We ended up settling on five gallinas (hens) and one gallo (rooster), and Milania gifted us two more chickens out of the goodness of her heart, one full sized hen and a little teenager one. Eight chickens in total. While I was still at her house she was showing me her chicken set up, where they lay their eggs, what to feed them, and that whole deal. When she was showing me were the chickens sleep, I got a little bit confused. Now, my spanish speaking and comprehending abilities have improved vastly over the last eight weeks, and I can almost always understand Milania now, but when she was explaining where the chickens sleep I was sure I was misunderstanding her, because what I understood was that the chickens sleep in a tree! I was cracking up and asked her three or four times to make sure I definitely understood her that at night, the chickens hop up a ladder (pictured above) into the branches of a tree and sleep for the night. My mind was blown. It makes sense if you think about it, they are up high securely away from predators, but before I was able to wrap my head around the fact, it was the funniest thing I had heard in weeks.
          Ok, so now I have the chickens in a cardboard box in the back of the pick up, I know how to take care of them, Milania's grandkids helped me set up their nests for egg laying, and Milania even lent me one of her chicken ladders so they could get up into a tree. The only problem now is that most Dominicans have their chickens running around their houses and their yards, but chickens smell awful and are quite noisy (particularly in the morning) so we weren't about to let our chickens run around the staff house. So I found a beautiful spot for them, far from the staff house, under a big shady mango tree perfect for sleeping in, but now the problem is that they were far away, so we couldn't monitor them and they could run away or get stolen pretty easily. As a solution to these problems Peter and I decided we would build them a fence out of chicken wire! So we got chicken wire, called our friend Meima to go out into the woods and cut us some posts (cause apparently you can't just buy them in a store) and after three days of the chickens roaming around randomly (thankfully they're all still around) we were building them a fence today. Digging individual holes for each post and dealing with the surprisingly rigid chicken wire was a bit tedious, but that was not, as we expected it to be, our most difficult task of the day. After we built the fence, we had to get the chickens into it. Trying to run down one chicken is hard enough (we found out), but eight seemed like a mountain we wouldn't be able to climb. Maybe if we were working out in an open field we would have had a chance, but we were by no means in an open field. We were surrounded by barbed wire fence on two sides, and lots and lots of thorny plants. So the first chicken we caught was the little teenager one cause we luckily ran it into one of the thorny bushes and it got stuck, but after that, it got much, much more difficult. Peter and I spend well over an hour army crawling under and jumping over the barbed wire fences all the while pulling thorns out of our feet. At the end of the hour and change, Peter had 10+ thorns stuck in his feet, and my right arm and leg were covered in blood from all the bushes and barbed wire I ran into, but let me tell you, it was all worth it. Each time we were able to catch another chicken and put it in it's new fenced in habitat, the feeling of satisfaction we felt rivaled that of pulling that piece of plastic off a new cell phone, or popping an entire roll of bubble wrap. So now as you can see, the chickens are happily in their shiny new enclosure living the chicken lifestyle. They eat a surprising amount of food and drink a surprising amount of water so I'm back there two or three separate times a day feeding and watering them. Now, after lots of hard work, we have a steady supply of fresh laid eggs (which are much better than ones that have been shipped all over, think fresh vs. frozen fish), and another chore to keep me busy. And *spoiler alert* I believe our next such venture on the property is going to be getting honey bees, so I'm going to learn how to be a bee keeper, how awesome would that be??? But until then, I have plenty of time to become a master chicken keeper.