This has been a very exciting time this past month. Last week we said goobye to six community representatives from our biggest Pacific Island nation- Papua New Guinea (PNG). The group: Grace, Igo, Kopsi, Kefin, Malisa, and Alii, were here for four VERY full weeks, being trained in Happy Chicken methods, in participatory methods of community resource management, permaculture farming techniques, and coral gardening to restore coral reefs and local fish stocks.
This holistic training focused on facilitating community well-being and prosperity, through faclitating the restoration of abundant resources provided by nature: including establishing no-fishing and no-hunting marine and forest reserves, and replacing wild-caught foods with home-grown eggs, chickens, and farm products.
The group stayed in our dormatory and helped cook the food. Every evening we shared stories around our traditional "happy circle", before sharing the evening meal together. Grace Manani, an agricultural extension officer with the Central Province government, was particularly good at telling interesting stories about the day, and relating things to her life growing up and living in the PNG bush.
The days of the workshop were educational and sometimes tiring, but filled with laughter and fun. The group learned chicken feed production using local resources: cassava, coconut, and locally available plants, selective chicken breeding to produce more productive and diverse chickens, simple chicken house designs, and how to train free-range chickens to sleep and to lay in their proper place- not in the trees and bushes! They also learned good hatchery managent skills and did planning exercises in preparation for applying what they learned in their own communities on their return to PNG. An in-depth Happy Chicken Manual was produced for the workshop, to reinforce what the trainees had learned, and to assist them with training others back home.
As PNG does not allow the importation of baby chicks from anywhere on earth, we unfortunately could not send chicks home with the trainees. But because of this policy, the demand for good quality chicks is very high and mostly unmet. The first task of the PNG workers will be to create their own breeding flocks, so that they can begin hatching chicks on behalf of the wider community.
The airfares and most expenses were provided by Kyeema Foundation, our wonderful partner organization in Australia. Kyeema will be following up on the progress made by the six PNG trainees over the next few years. On this foundation they/we plan to build up a national Happy Chicken program in PNG. Additional workshops at our Fiji model farm and training center are being discussed for the future.
Without your generous donations, these sorts of capacity building workshops would not be possible. We have succeeded in establishing a functioning hatchery, and have created an improved mixed breed of productive egg laying chickens, providing over 35,000 free-range chickens to poor rural communities throughout Fiji, providing cyclone relief by restoring damaged community poultry flocks, setting up small hatcheries in four remote villages, and bringing in people for training from dozens of Fijian communities- from nine islands and from three additional Pacific countries as well (Vanuatu, Kiribati, and PNG).
Thank you again so much for your kind and loving assisance.
The World Surf League provided flights for our own world-famous coral gardener, Dr. Austin Bowden-Kerby, in this week's effort to help a youth group restore a coral reef in French Polynesia. Here's Austin (in the red scarf) with a group of surfers and the Moorea Coral Gardeners, having the time of his life on the most beautiful island, just being one of the kids helping to save the reef.
World-class surfers, several in the photo above, love and respect coral reefs and they want to help. Once the surfing community found out about Austin's scientific expertise in restoring damaged and threatened coral reefs, he was brought in to train this group of coral advocates in new methods. Suffice it to say, it is many nautical miles from Fiji to Moorea via NZ and Tahiti. Austin was able to send this field report & reflections while the coral cuts were fresh, and a few tears of gratitude still flowed. Here's the newsflash from Sofitel Moorea la Ora Beach Resort:
I am leaving today by boat to Tahiti, to visit another group for training in coral gardening. Then leave at 2 am tonight for Fiji via NZ. The trip has been exhausting but incredible. The group gave me a beautiful black pearl that one of their parents had farmed as a going away present.
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Greetings to all our Happy Chicken supporters. Thanks to your generosity, Global Giving funds helped leverage a grant from the Pacific Developmenrt and Conservation Trust (NZ), and we were finally able to get solar power installed into our Happy Chicken hatchery!
This is a very important step in securing the survival of the developing chicks, as two cyclones have in the past caused widespread power failure for several weeks, and the resulting loss of over 700 developing chicks each time. The solar power also saves on our power bills and helps the hatchery become carbon neutral.
We hatched 730 chicks in July, and we are just now at full capacity, with peak laying season for the hens, and we expect over 900 chicks per month from August through October, with a gradual decine beginning in November and December and with low season in February /March as the hens mostly go into moult, changing their feahers and gathering strength for another year of laying.
We continue to sell the chicks at cost or slightly below cost to the poor farmers in the area, and we give the chicks away to needy families in the surrounding comunities. This week we sent five young breeding roosters to Tailevu, on the other side of the island, to reinforce a youth project using imported layer hens, which will be crossed to produce improved local hybrid layers, hatched in one of the small 90-egg incubators we have gotten for communities. Two weeks ago we sent 50, 4-week old pullets to Malolo Island to start a project there.
Our next scheduled workshop is the first week of October, with six people coming all the way from Papua New Guinea to learn our community-appropriate methods, also paired with Fijian counterparts who have asked to be trained.
Farm News: Our hatchery manager Nicole, married to our farm manager Emenoni (Junia), delivered a healthy baby boy four weeks ago, and so others have been filling in to do the work, including young volunteers from Austraila and the USA. Every time we have needed extra help, somehow it has been provided. The work is sometimes overwhelming, but the blessings are overflowing, and through you, and unseen hands the resources required are given.
Vinaka vakalevu, loloma levu mai Viti.
(Thank you very much, much love from Fiji.)
