Chicken Exchange

We waited for about a half hour. Oneyda peeled an orange, dragging a knife slowly under the very outer layer of the rind, leaving the white. She told us about her Taiwanese neighbors, Taoists, who had given her some exercises to do in the mornings for her health.

Finally, Carmen strode grinning through her garden, dressed in a matching purple shirt and skirt. I rose to greet her with the customary kiss on the cheek. After some small talk, we set out in the pickup truck to find some chickens in La Sabanita, an area known for raising La Gallina Criolla, or "Native Hen," which is prized for its flavor and nutritiousness.

We walked down the dusty path, stopping at gate after gate and calling ¨Are you selling chickens?" The answer was always the same: "No, they´re too small." Why no chickens in this region famus for its chickens? La Gallina Criolla is what most Nicaraguans cook for Christmas dinner. They sell for five dollars a piece, which is a big chunk of money for a family that makes its living farming. Most families raise these chickens and then sell them for the holidays, eating the eggs in the meantime. Since it´s just after New Years, most families are raising a young flock of chicks-- too young to sell, since it´s difficult to tell from a chick what the mature bird will look like.

I asked Carmen how people kept theives from stealnig their chickens. "It´s a small community," she explained, "and you know what your animals look like. They don´t wander far, and if someone sees a person in the market selling a chicken that looks like your chicken, they tell you. But it is hard sometimes, because yuo don´t always catch them."

Carmen emerged from the last house, where a pig the size of a LazyBoy rooted in the muddy yard. "We´ll have to wait a couple months," said Carmen as we walked back to the pickup truck.
"But aren´t the women who are coming to the meeting expecting to receive chickens?" I asked. "Yes, but we´ll have at least some because the women from the first round of the project will be bringing their hens back today," Oneyda explained.

Back at the house, Oneyda, Elena, and I sat back down on the porch while Carmen busied herself in the house. We unstacked the tower of plastic chairs she brought, arranging them in a circle on tha patio. Ten minutes later, they were all full. Twenty women had arrived-- half of them carrying chickens. Some held their birds upside down by the feet, blinking, wings hanging helplessly. Others carried mesh bags that twitched and clucked softly. One woman cradled two chicks between her forearm and her bosom. A little boy held a mahogany-colored hen´s wings closed in his hands, as I had learned to do earlier that day.

"How are we going to do this?" I wondered. Then Carmen stepped to the center of the circle with two large baskets and explained the process in Spanish too fast for me to understand. She began calling out the women´s names as Oneyda stood poised, pen to notebook.

"Maria Teresa Aleman Gonzales," she yelled.
"Four," a woman answered, and brought forth her bag of hens. One by one, she lifted the four hens from the bag and placed them in the basket. Their feet were tied, but some struggled, ending up awkwardly sideways. Carmen lifted them and rearranged them, and, as if by magic, they sat still on their fat chests in the basket, blinking. With each new addition in the baskets, feathers ruffled and stretched, and a hen or two found a way, even with feet tied, to climb out of the basket, dragging the wing or foot of another with her. The clucking grew louder until we had to yell to hear over it.

Then, Carmen began to call the names of the new women. Each took three hens and a rooster, re-tying their feet and placing them in bags or upside-down for the journey home. And then it was done. The Gallina Criolla Project had finished its first round and begun its second. Even without a hundred percent attendance, we had exchanged 36 hens-- up from the 24 that had started the project.