Chickens

Today, I held a chicken for the first time. Tobias, Oneyda´s husband, and I were in the back yard at Comunicada´s office. There, two hens and a rooster pecked at the bare dirt ground in the shade of an avocado tree.

"Here," he said, "I´ll show you. You have to make sure they weigh enough when you buy them." He creeps towards one, and then swiftly grabs it and folds its wings between his hands. "See," he said, "pesada." Heavy. He held it out to me. I shook my head. I´ve never held a chicken before. I was afraid I´d break a wing, get scratched. "No, no," he said, "It´s OK. You just hold it like this." So I took the hen, holding its wings closed. She blinked and craned her head toward the ground. Black and white, her feathers felt silky under my fingers. I could feel the bones in her wings, feel her lungs expand and contract as she breathed. She blinked again, and I bent to the ground to release her. Away she strutted.

"They sleep in the avocado tree," he explained, "and we don´t have to feed them because when there´s no food they eat the leaves of the tree." A good arrangement. "These chickens, they taste much better than the industrial ones. That´s why they´re expensive. People save them for a special occasion, or for when they´re sick. You make a soup of one of these, and it´s very nutritious. It helps you get well..."

Later that day, Elena and I rode a dusty 20 miles in the back of Oneyda´s pickup truck to El Pochote, a community on the other side of the volcano from the city of Masaya. We covered curving stretches of brick road, passing horse-drawn carts, roaring buses, and whitewashed churches-- all of which praised the Lord Jesus Christ in colorful handpainted letters on their sides.

We drew to a halt on a dirt road in front of a turquoise house beloning to Carmen, the woman who runs Comunicada´s Chickens Changing Lives project. A few hens pecked at the ground in her garden: a carpet of shiny, low-growing greenery punctuated by shrubs and ruffled flowers.

Her daughter dragged two rocking chairs onto the porch for us, and brought a bowl of glistening, freshly washed bananas and oranges she had picked earlier in the week. We sat down to wait in the shade. As Elena was about to find out, there is a lot of waiting involved in community work in Nicaragua. Many people have no telephone, so there is no way to know for sure than someone will be at home when you come to visit. So we waited, and we talked about chickens.