Chickens are generally viewed as farm animals without a
whole lot of use. They can produce eggs, and they will eventually become
chicken nuggets or chicken sandwiches, but beyond that there is not a whole lot
was can do with them. Or so I thought!
One of the problems the mission has is that there are a
bunch of cockroaches that scurry around in the kitchen and the halls. Not only
do they dirty everything they crawl on, but they’re gross. They rarely come
into my room, probably because they’ve seen the rather unfortunate results of
the few who have ventured there, but they are in the kitchen and the hall, and
now with the warmer and damper weather, they seem to be multiplying. More and
more are scurrying around the halls at night, and even though my shoe can keep
a few from venturing into my bedroom, it can’t do much else.
The mission needs an effective way to deal with the roaches.
The traditional American solution, getting an exterminator, is out because
Haiti doesn’t have any exterminators. The mission can put out roach traps, but
their affect is limited and unless we have every group of volunteers bring more
roach traps, they won’t have a significant impact on the roach problem. The
fewer people who bring traps the better, every additional pound of traps
brought down by volunteers means one less pound of hammers, books, computers
and other more useful things. The other problem with roach traps is that they
have to be disposed of in some way. Haiti doesn’t have an effective garbage
collection system, so the traps would have to either be burned or dumped in a
vacant lot. There are many environmental problems with dumping poisonous roach
traps into a vacant area, the most significant of which being that someone’s
animal (and savings account) could mistakenly eat it and die. So what is the
mission to do? Should we just learn to deal with them and carry a heavy shoe
where ever we go?
One afternoon when I was getting my lunch ready I came out
to the porch outside of my room to see a chicken wandering around. The mission
keeps a few chickens around in the garden, and they occasionally wander outside
of it when school is not in session. I figured that this chicken must have been
on the lam for quite some time because she had managed to get herself to the
second story of the mission. There is only one entrance to the second story and
it is probably one hundred feet from the garden with a few obstacles in
between. The chickens here are pretty friendly and so I didn’t think too much
of the chicken until I saw it jump forward and begin to peck vigorously at the
ground. What was this crazy chicken doing? I wasn’t 100% sure if the chicken
would attack my foot if it got close enough, but in the name of an entertaining
story I crept forward. I saw the chicken quickly dash forward again and leap
down on a cockroach.
I thought this chicken had wandered up to around my room by
accident, but the chicken was actually being quite smart. The chicken must have
somehow stumbled upon the many colonies of bugs that live around the mission,
and made her way up to our level for dinner. The chicken was jumping around and
eating any cockroach that dared jump out into the open. She would jump out and
go for the kill. The chicken was great, she was pretty small so she could get
in some of the small nooks where the bugs hid, and she was fast. The
cockroaches didn’t stand a chance.
This lesson is one the most important lessons Haiti has
taught me; success has no formula. If something works, it works. Even if a
solution does not look good or is not “conventional” doesn’t mean it can’t
adequately address a problem. When I first came to Haiti my vision for success
was not a Haitian picture but an American picture. I envisioned a technical
school very similar to something I would have seen in Pittsburgh, a standard
school that runs during the day and has a job placement service. What I have
created is something totally different. The La Croix trade school does not have
the normal hours that a trade school in the US would have, the internship and
job placement process is much different than it would be in the US, even the
teachers are different than I thought they would be. The only thing that this
school has in common with a school in the US is that it adequately prepares
students with a trade they can use, and that’s what matters. I found a Haitian
solution that works for the Haitian people.
This chicken was great. She didn’t cost anything, she didn’t
have any poison or release anything harmful into the environment, and most
importantly she cut down on the cockroach population. The only issue I have
with her is that I can’t easily pick her up and bring her to feast daily.
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