Something very sad is going on. A few days ago, we noticed that Speckles (the larger of our chickens) wasn’t leaving the coop. “Maybe she’s going to finally lay an egg?” we wondered, hopefully. But two more days of this passed, and we started to get worried. On the neighbor’s recommendation, we took her out and set her in the cornfield. She seemed unmotivated to do much except just sit around, eyes half closed. About the time I started worrying that she might be sick, my neighbor Lucas came over to chat. He mentioned in passing that his chickens were sick, too.

That night, Henley didn’t come home. Even MORE chicken strife! A quick search of the area revealed that she’d decided to spend the night in another neighbor’s pigpen with the little oinker. Heley is still alert and lively; perhaps she too suspects that someting is amiss with Speckles.

I took her out of the coop again this morning, but it looks like thing are worse. Even though she doesn’t have nasal or ocular secretions, her head sometimes rolls around in awkward ways. Also, a check of the coop reveals that her droppings are far greener and more solid than normal. These are classic signs of my worst fear: Newcastle Disease Virus. It’s a nasty avian sickness that has a nearly 100% fatality rate, and is the bane of chicken farmers throughout Central America, even though it’s been eradicated from the US since 1974. Lina, the girl next door who helps us with the chickens sometimes, even found this grackle flopping around near the river, and thinks she can save it. Newcastle affects more avians than just chickens.

When the last chicken plague went through a few months ago, I started looking into the idea of getting an expert down here to teach everyone how to vaccinate their chickens. I guess this is my comeuppance for not taking care of it sooner: watching my own beloved chicken die a slow, excruciating death.

This gets us to thinking a lot about the nature of our existence here, on a personal level, not about our work-related successes or failures. We want to use these two years to learn about stuff for our future, things that we didn’t have the time or opportunity to learn in the US: how to raise chickens, how to grow plants, how to live simply. It seems like we are beset with so many failures. We’ve gone through 6 chickens, and have exactly 1.5 eggs to show for it. We’ve planted a few hundred square feet of vegetables, only to see most of them killed by cutworms or never come up at all. We live on a few hundred dollars a month, but spend way too much time dreaming about fashionable shoes and high-quality handtools. But we’re starting to realize that every failure we make here is one less failure we’ll have to suffer through in the future. And that is a comforting thought.