The Chicken Project

Sometime this July one of my PCV friends emailed me.  She said a guy from an international NGO had asked about me and wanted to talk to me about a project and she wanted my permission before forwarding him my contacts.  I gave her the go ahead curious what this project was.

This NGO is a well known organization in Lesotho.  It’s American funded and concentrates on helping OVC (orphaned and vulnerable children) and others affected by HIV/AIDS.  They used to have a presence in my area but I had heard that they had stopped soon after I had arrived.  Needless to say, I was six months away from leaving Lesotho and I wasn’t very interested in getting involved with a large project but I figured I’d stay minimally involved.

A few days later my contact came to see me in the village to talk about the details of the project.  He told me that the organization had some money (actually a lot of money) to do an agricultural project in this community and it had to benefit OVCs especially those affected by HIV/AIDS.

Now, I have very limited contact with my community and have never even attempted to do a project with them.  I have my reasons; one, I’m always busy at school. Two, the community doesn’t really seem to need anything that I could help them with (they want electricity, a community center, and a clinic in the village).  But above all I have no interest working with the chief who is a drunk or the elected official in the area who I have heard is also good for nothing.  So when World Vision wanted to do a project with the community I told him straight up that I had very little idea what was possible in this community but I could tell him anything he wanted about the school.  After telling him what the school was doing he decided to work with them.

School started in a few weeks and he came by to speak with the teachers on what projects we could do.  When I spoke to him in July he was thinking about a chicken projects (which we already do at the school as a practical project but he wanted to expand it), a piggery (which the school had but was having problems with so we slaughtered the pigs), and an orchard (which at that time I was working with Ministry of Forestry to get one at my school already so he suggested we just add more trees).  I also suggested getting rabbits (which one of my teachers had told me about and seemed like a good project).  When he came to the school and spoke to the teachers he insisted on doing a chicken project which the school was not interested in expanding.  Raising chickens takes a lot of work and they preferred a piggery where the NGO could help them build a proper home (which we did not have funds to do) and help us buy new pigs to start off with.  Pigs take much less work to take care of but since World Vision insisted on chickens the school reluctantly agreed; they weren’t going to argue on something that was coming for free.

The old and new chicken houses

And so my contact submitted his business plan for approval, hired locals to build a new chicken house, and started working on acquiring the chickens.  When he was planning the project he told me that to make a real profit the school needs to be able to raise 500 chickens at a time and our chicken house could only handle 100.  So I was under the impression that the new building would be very large yet at the end it was around the same size as the previous.

A few weeks later, on a Thursday, he came by to check on the progress.  On that day we were having our farewell for our Form E’s (saying good bye) but I left to see him to get an idea what was going on.  He told me that he would bring the chicken food on Friday and the chickens would be coming soon.  I warned him that on Friday the school ended at 1pm and the next week we had vacation.  He nodded his head as if it wasn’t a problem and I reported to the rest of my co-workers.

He didn’t come on Friday, he ended up coming on Saturday which, by chance, some students and teachers were there to go to a competition so we were able to store the food away before leaving.  Later that week, when we had no school, he came to drop off the chickens.  Since there was no one there to take care of them he took them to town to the deputy principal’s house to take care of them until school began.

The chickens with small feeders and drinkers

On Monday the chickens were transported to school and the next week I asked my co-worker minding the chickens when we were going to get them (no one had told me that they had already come).  It was only then she told me the story and mentioned that ever since they were delivered to my deputy, one chick had been dying each day.  Hoping it was due to shock from the transport they were waiting to see what would happen.

That Friday, since the chickens were still dying, they bought medicine and put it in their water hoping to stop the problem and my co-workers told me the whole story.  The new house was not built properly; it leaked and had no ventilation so they had to leave the door open which allowed animals, rats, and other unwanted animals to enter.  On top of that, since they had no warning when the chicks were arriving, they had no time to clean the house and there might be some mold or bacteria that could be making the chickens sick.  So that weekend my co-workers, with the help of some students, cleaned the old chicken house and moved the chickens in there hoping to see a change.  There was none.

The traditional medicine

A few days later, seeing that the medicine didn’t work, my co-workers did an autopsy on one of the dead chicks.  They saw that the liver was enlarged and there was a yellow coat around it.  They decided to try a traditional Basotho medicine to help the chickens.  They found the plant in the village and squeezed its juices in to the water.

There have been other problems with the project.  This project is supposed to benefit certain students yet World Vision has not spoken to us on how they would like us to identify these students or how it should help them.  While the school is more than capable of figuring this out ourselves a good project manager would make sure we have a process for this project to continue in to the longer term.  And we have no idea if and when he will bring the rest of the chickens he promised.

I spoke to some of my volunteer friends about this since I had expected this project to go more smoothly and be better managed.  They said they weren’t surprised.  When I was discussing this project with him, he said he wanted this project to be finished by September and I understand that he needed it to be done by the end of the fiscal year.  And I suspect that when reporting on the number of children helped by this project he will report “200” the size of my school, not the number of OVCs here since he never asked for such a report from us.  But I have heard that this is typical of NGOs here.

With adult feeders and drinkers

When I first spoke with the NGO I was told about the various projects he did in my village and how they all failed but now I can see why.  With such poor communication, no regard for what the actual needs of the organization are, and no plan for the future, it’s obvious to see how the results are all the same.  It makes me wonder if these organizations lack the skills and knowledge to understand this or they simply don’t want to put in the time.  I’ve spoken to many people who work for NGO’s and I’ve realized that for them this is just a job.

It’s been a few weeks since my colleagues administered the traditional medicine to the chickens and they are all doing very well now.  We started out with a hundred chickens and fourteen have died.  Still, for the school this round is almost a hundred percent profit since we didn’t put any money in.  Though things were not going well with this project for some time my colleagues are excited by this income generating project and the ways they can develop the school using the funds generated from this project.  So all in all I think the project will have a happy ending.