Chicken Rearing

This project has the same principals as the 'Fish Raising" project. IBEC provides training in rearing chickens and supplies a small initial grant to buy the first few chickens and feed, in order to rasie the family's livelihood. The training sessions are conducted by the school teachers which also gets the teachers and parents acquainted and increases the trust in the educational system and establishes a personal relationship between the teachers and the parents. This is really important over her as, due to the countries histor, there is an inbuilt distrust in institutions especially governmental ones - it is getting better but the more transparency and involvement there is the better.
I met the aunt, of the student who is being helped, she is the head of this family - the boy lost his mother when he was one and then his father at the age of 4 and moved in with her however they are really poor and couldn't afford to support him and this is where the project helps - by having the income and food from the chickens the child now goes off to school and can afford an education.

These 28 chicks are just 2 weeks old

Garden that they roam free in once old enough

 The plant hanging down from the terrace usually offers shelter for the animals when it is in bloom - also has very large cucumberesque vegetables hanging off them - haven't figured out what they are yet.

Good size house I think..

The chicks are kept in the cage for the first few weeks to protect them and so that they get use to their home and then they are allowed out to explore. This family have an amazingly large chicken coup/house built under theor house - it's the size of my room here at Smile!
Most of the houses here in this area are built on stilts and have an enclosed area above for sleeping and then underneath is the place for cooking, keeping animals, storage and resting during the day in the relative coolness that the shade offers. Also it is extremely good in this area as there is a lot of flooding that happens in the wet season due to the Mekong swelling in size.

This year especially the flooding of the Mekong has been huge - I am waiting with interest to see the actual size of the Mekong in the dry season as I have been told that outside Smile where I live it drops down so much that a patch of land appears where they play volley ball in the evenings - at the moment I cannot imagine it at all.

This is another family's coup that we visited

In this coup there was a very broody lady sitting on her eggs and being very protective.