Lucky Chickens and One Unlucky Chicken - by Nancy

Chickens in the village lead a pretty nice life. There seems to be plenty of natural food for them to eat. They all look fat and healthy.

They run around anywhere they want.

Roosters crow - like roosters anywhere, I guess, at any hour of the day or night. In the middle of the night (well, maybe technically morning if you consider 4:00 a.m. morning) I would hear roosters from our village crowing, and then roosters from the nearby village crowing back. To my mind, they weren't saying "Cock-a-doodle-do." It sounded as if they were saying... "It's all okay here". Like they were night watchmen giving a report.

Now to the unlucky chicken part of the story. One afternoon, a man came walking through our village on his way to the next village. He was carrying a chicken.
No, it is NOT the same chicken as on the porch in the photo above! (As far as I know, that chicken is still happily running around the village).

I thought this chicken was dead. Sara informed me that it was not. She said because they have no refrigeration and it's 95 degrees out, they don't kill it until they want to cook it. Okay! I said, "I wish I had gotten a photo of that".

Sara told me to grab my camera and go after him, because she was sure he'd love to have his picture taken. So I did. And as soon as some of the family saw what I wanted, they started hollering to him to come back.

He was quite please to have his photo taken with his dangling live chicken.

He wanted to look at it on my camera screen. Everyone in the village likes to have their picture taken and then look at it on your camera screen. In fact, the very best time to take photos of the kids would be while they are looking at their pictures on the back of your camera, because they get huge smiles on their faces when they see themselves. Since most of them don't have mirrors, I guess that is a pretty special thing. (I didn't see myself in a mirror the whole five days we were in the village) I didn't miss it, but it is certainly different than at home!