Tale of Two Chickens (sorry erik)

My Thanksgiving here was good; different than the usual Cliffer family thanksgivings, but it was fun. We all got to be together for it, and we prepared a large feast with the sheep that the chief of OHG had given to us a while back as well as a turkey from the U.S. that was a gift from the Ambassador.

Last weekend, my friend Erik and I decided to bike to his future site to check it out, since it’s so close to Ouahigouya. Well, actually, we had planned on going to my future site as well, which is even closer to Ouahigouya, but a chain of events occurred that made this goal impossible. I’ll explain. There’s a current peace corps volunteer (PCV), Christina, who’s site is actually only a 1K ride from Erik’s village, so we biked to her village on Saturday night and stayed the night there. The plan was to go to Erik’s village Saturday night, and then mine the next morning on our way home, but when we got to Christina’s house, she realized that she had left her key in Ouahigouya (OHG). It’s about an hour bike ride, so it wasn’t really plausible to bike all the way back to OHG and then back again to her village before dark. We ended up eventually finding someone with a moto who rode back to recover the key, but with all the confusion of explaining where it was literally by drawing maps in the dirt, and then figuring out what to do for dinner since all Christina’s food was in her inaccessible house, it got too late to go to Erik’s village. The midwife of Christina’s CSPS was really nice, and let us eat dinner at her house while we waited for the key. So Sunday morning, we went to Erik’s village, saw his house and CSPS, and met his major (his future counterpart) and his chef du village. Before leaving the village, Erik’s Chef du Village gave him two chickens as a gift. This was great and all, but we had about a 20K bike ride to get back home to our training village, and in the heat of the day, it was no easy task to transport the chickens hanging upside down from our handlebars. Erik and I split the job of carrying them on our handlebars. We had planned to stop and see my village, but we were afraid that the chickens would get dehydrated and die, so we decided to forgo the idea and just go back home. Ouahigouya is about half way between Erik’s future village and our current training village, and it was so hot that it took us 2 hours just to get to OHG. Don’t ask me why we are idiots and decided to bike in literally the hottest part of the day, but we stopped in OHG to take a rest and give the chickens some water, and noticed that one of the chickens wasn’t doing very well. It wasn’t drinking any of the water we tried to give it, and it was kind of just lying there sadly, beak to the ground. We were hungry, so we left the chickens at the training center (they were tied together so they couldn’t really go far) and went to get lunch. Sadly, when we came back to get the chickens before we rode the rest of the way home, one was dead. I felt a bit terrible, but there was nothing we could do, and we didn’t want to have to bring the dead chicken to our village, so we found someone on the street who would take an already dead chicken. Before taking the chicken, he gave us a lecture on how you have to check animals before you buy them to make sure they’re not sick. It was awkward. Anyway, we ended up finally making it back home with one live chicken, which Erik and his family then ate the next night for dinner. Apparently it was delicious.